Movement : Hagar Kotef

Movement is the change in the position of a body (object or subject) or part of it over the course of
a certain interval of time. This is my working definition. By the end of this essay I hope to open this
definition, not so much by “abstracting movement”—by thinking of the more “metaphoric”
meanings it encompasses—but by exploring the ways in which the figurative and the material work
through each other (i.e. by showing how this distinction makes very limited sense). Movement
however, will be defined here indirectly, through another question: what makes “movement” a
central political concept?
This centrality, of course, is yet to be demonstrated and clarified. Different changes in the position
of a body over time may be political, or not, according to their particularities (the same practice
may, or may not be political, according to its context: walking down a street to the market or as part
of a march; a parliament member raising her hand to vote or to wave a friend. The question here,
however, does not concern the specificity of the movement itself, but rather the terms, contexts, and
settings in which the act is performed). Yet I want to propose that above and beyond these
derivative meanings, movement per se is central to a political lexicon. Indeed, “central” to the
extent that Arendt has referred to it as “the substance and meaning of all things political.”1
In what follows I pursue this claim, first, by mapping the political operations of movement into four
major layers, schematically classified as (i) orders or regimes; (ii) processes of subject formations
or available subject positions; (iii) political ideologies; and (iv) a more “meta” reflection on the
meanings of “the political.” Second, I examine the operation of movement (as a concept as well as a
physical phenomenon) within one segment of our political thinking, a segment central to both the
history of political thought and to our political present: liberal theory. Drawing on one anecdote that
illustrates some of the different political operations of movement, I explicate some of the roles
movement has within this discourse. I open, however, with a reading in Plato. This reading should
hopefully open to one of many possible points of resonance with my later analysis—showing
simultaneously the possible echoes across schools of thought and the differences between them.
Setting the Stage: Plato and Lexical Movements
The lexical project which is taking form through these virtual pages (as well as conferences and
workshops) asks us—authors and readers—to follow one formal principle: to address the Socratic
question “what is x?” Since this project is very much situated within the history of ideas, this call
for definitions does not seek to erase history. Many of us who share these pages also share some
version of the claim that “x” cannot be understood without the history of its uses. Nevertheless, it
may seem that the Socratic formulation that is posed as the only rule for this lexical game assumes
that this history can somehow be folded into itself, encapsulated, and enveloped within one
formulation that always remains in the present: “what is x?”—“x is.” Yet x never simply is; at least
not in a static manner. As Claudia Baracchi brilliantly shows us, even in the Platonic framework
definitions and knowledge—indeed, the Socratic dialog itself—are not fully separable from
movement.
The prisoners in Plato’s cave demonstrate that “our” problem is “a stiffness, staticity.” The people in
the cave are characterized by “a certain inability to turn around, a powerlessness with respect to
movement, to a dynamic connection with the surrounding.”2 In order to know, they must be able to
move. However, while all the people in the cave are bound, the desired movement of the many is
not the ability to be released from their chains and climb up and out of the cave. This is the power,
the privilege, of the few. One may speculate that a more widespread act of climbing produces
precisely the threat that Plato sees in democracy—a threat he very much articulates by appealing to
movement.

*This project is in debt to many, whose names would exceed the frame of this limited acknowledgement. For their
indispensible contribution to the segment herein I thank Adi Ophir, Ann Stoler, Merav Amir, Gil Anidjar, and the members of
the Workshop on Political Concepts 2012.

1. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 129.↩
2. Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2002), 23-24.↩

In his critique of the democratic polis, Plato marks a triangularity connecting liberty, movement,
and danger that is central to what follows. Democracy’s excessive love of freedom means it
constantly fails to produce and sustain order. This failure has to do with the status of the laws,
hierarchies within the family or between citizens and foreigners, and, above all, the structure of the
soul itself. Yet across all these levels, this failure is configured by Plato also via the image of a
disordered, uncontrollable mobility. It is not merely that democracy fails to confine those who
should be constrained, so that “people who have been commanded to death or exile” can be found
“strolling around” the city’s streets. The democratic man himself engages in politics in a frantic
manner, “leaping up from his seat and saying and doing whatever comes into mind.”3 “Leaping”
and “saying whatever comes into mind” are presented here as somehow linked. This link would
return repeatedly in the history of western political thought, connecting particular patterns of
movement—or certain images thereof—to questions of rationality. It folds thought and movement
into one another, so that one is thought of in terms of the other, imagined and demonstrated by
appealing to the other. We will return to this point and its significance later.
Indeed, as the rule of the demos, democracy is the mode of governance of those who are bound to
move. While we have become accustomed to thinking of demos as the body of citizens or “the
people,” its original meaning was “country” (or land), and later the concept came to refer to the
people of the countryside, and thus the poor.4 The demos, therefore, was composed of those who did
not live in the city but had to walk to participate in acts of legislation and governance. Accordingly,
the necessity to labor, which was contrasted to the freedom of the citizens of Athens—a freedom,
precisely, from this necessity—was interwoven into another necessity and another contrast: the
contrast between the privilege of stability, of the ability of staying put, of having an estate on the
one hand, and the curse of requisite movement on the other. This curse, it seems, has stained the
demos’ political organization (democracy) with some form of excess.
This emphasis on stability reflects a more general Greek paradigm within which the ordered
movement of almost all things gravitates towards rest. Movement was seen as a temporary
interruption, a process by which things find their proper place. Accordingly, moving away from
one’s place, as necessarily occurs in the case of the demos (if they are to participate in matters of
politics), was a problem, a disturbance in the order of things. When the demos-as-a-mob entered the
city, their movement violated the stability which is the privilege of the citizens-as-the-few, and
subjected the city to its rule of excessive freedom. With that movement, the city was contaminated
with wildness and savagery that ultimately manifested itself in one of the most horrifying effects of
democracy in Plato’s satirical version of Athens: animals “roam freely and proudly along the streets,
bumping into anyone who doesn’t get out of their way.”5 It is eventually the animal (and the
animal-like-savage), not the free citizen, whose freedom of movement is unlimited.
Nevertheless, Plato was not a thinker of motionlessness. And even though he dreaded the movement
of the many, a complete lack of movement on their part was also a problem. Here we return to the
cave. The desired movement of the many in the cave is but the ability “to turn . . . their heads
around.”6 It is a metaphorical movement of heads (thinking? souls?) towards knowledge. Yet, we
must bear in mind that in Plato this “metaphor” is quite literal. It is a movement towards knowledge
that is quite literally a moving towards—turning towards (and returning to)—its objects: the ideas.
Undoubtedly, it is a constrained and moderated movement:
a kind of resistance to flux is necessary for anything to come to be, according to its
order, to its law and rhythm. Life does not flow in a broad, undifferentiated course. It
flows through shapes, forms and configurations. As shapes, forms and configurations it
flows.7

Knowing—moving one’s head in circles, if not untying oneself and climbing out of a cave—
necessitates lingering. Nonetheless, we can see that even in its platonic formulation—the
formulation that is often seen as emphasizing one of the most stable metaphysics—the question
“what is x?” has to take movement into account. And already in its platonic formulation, this lexical
question—the question of both language and knowledge—is a political question, a question of
forms of rule which is also the question of the distinction between the movement of the many and
that of the few.

3. Plato, Republic (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1992), 558a and 61d.↩
4. Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Grec (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck),
273-74; J. A. O. Larsen, “Demokratia,” Classical Philology 68:1 (1973): 45; Kurt A. Raaflaub,
Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 158.↩
5. Plato, Republic, 553d.↩
6. Plato, Republic, 514a.↩
7. Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic, 25.↩

2. Political Operations: “Movement” in Politics and Political Thought

2.1 Regimes
Different forms and technologies of ordering movement were always central to the formations of
different political orders and ideologies.8 The modern state—to take what is perhaps one of the
most relevant examples—especially after the invention of the passport, and increasingly with the
evolution of technologies of sealing and regulating borders, is to a great degree a system of
regulating, ordering, and disciplining bodies (and other objects) in motion.9 Indeed, paraphrasing
Max Weber’s famous claim, John Torpey proposes that the modern state was also consolidated by
monopolizing the “legitimate means of movement.”10
More broadly we can say that we live within political systems that are by no means reducible to the
state, which have an increasing interest in (or perhaps just an increasing effective control over)
movements: who may enter (for example, the state, but also the gated community, sometimes even
the street, the playground); who may stay (and for how long? the “guest” worker may stay, on the
condition she will be willing to leave when no longer needed, but the “undocumented” immigrant—
which is de-facto the same social position—is always already “illegal” by her very act of staying);
who—or what—should be contained and constrained (young African-American men in prisons,
asylum seekers in detention camps, demonstrations within tightly policed enclaves); on the
circulation of what good (or capital) a tax must be paid; the exportation of what good (or capital, or
people) should be hindered or promoted; which segments should be entrenched (segments of the
border—a decision which is integral to the Schmittian decision regarding friend and enemy—but
also segments of the city, the neighborhood, the public space). As Foucault demonstrates throughout
his work, these systems are the substance, the transmission medium, through which the modern
subject emerges.
2.2 Subjects
In his various writings, Foucault unfolds the different incarnations of these systems: their early
formation as a system of confinement, the more complex modes of distributing bodies in space he
identifies as the essence of disciplinary power, and a later attentiveness to circulation that eventually
becomes, according to him, “the only political stake and the only real space of political struggle and
contestation.”11
Through all these incarnations of logics and technologies, both subjects and powers take form via
movement and its regulation. Different technologies of regulating, limiting, producing or inciting
movement are therefore different “technolog[ies] of citizenship.”12 They are also technologies of
colonization, gender-based domestication, expropriation, and exclusion—which always work in
tandem with citizenship. Disability studies have long called our attention to the relation between
ability and citizenship, between particular assumptions regarding the “normal” manners of carrying
our bodies in space, and the construction of democratic spaces (in the dual meaning of this term).
Similar ties can be found when examining movement across global contexts: some patterns of
movement—and stability—emerge as essential to free citizenship; other patterns of movement—
and confinement, or stagnation—are deployed rather to preclude precisely this freedom. Ultimately,
therefore, we can map different modes of configuring and ordering movement into different forms
of subject-positions, and thus, into the production and justification of different forms of rule.
2.3 Ideologies
Many political ideologies have explicitly referred to themselves by an appeal to movement. Early in
the twentieth century, in one of the first reflections on liberal theory, L.T Hobhouse defined
liberalism as a political critique whose main “business” is “to remove obstacles which block human
progress.”13 While liberalism also imposes restraints, those are but means for a greater goal: the
construction and sustainment of a liberal society, which is conceived by Hobhouse as an organism
almost literally moving forward. It is not simply, adds Michael Freeden, that “concepts such as
civilization, movement, and vitality turn out to be inextricably linked to liberal discourse and the
liberal frame of mind”; what “sets liberalism aside from most of its ideological rivals, whose
declared aspiration is to finalize their control over the political imagination,” he argues, is tolerance,
which “suggests a flexibility, a movement, a diversity—of ideas, of language, and of conceptual
content.”14 It does not matter, for the current purpose, whether this diagnosis is correct or not; it is
enough to argue that there is a liberal imaginary seeing itself as a moving body of thought which
facilitates the movement of the political space itself.15
Yet despite this appeal to movement as a criterion “setting liberalism aside from most of its
ideological rivals,” these rivals, too, have often appealed to the same phenomenon to define
themselves. In State, Movement, People, Carl Schmitt’s juridical account of the structure of the third
Reich, Schmitt defines the National Socialist state as composed of three elements: the state (a static
element), the people (a non-political element), and the movement (which he later identifies with the
party): the “dynamic political element” which “carries the State and the People, penetrates and leads
the other two.”16
There are three crucial attributes of the movement in Schmitt’s account. First, it is the only political
element in the trio. Both the state and the people may be political only through it. Second, it is the
“dynamic engine” in it—it is the force vitalizing politics by moving it, and perhaps we may say: the
force which is political by the virtue of its moving capabilities.17 Finally, it is the bearer or the
carrier of a unity: through it the trio becomes a whole. This unmitigated nature of the movement
that comes to encompass the entirety of the political structure, is, Schmitt argues, precisely what
distinguishes the German National-Socialist state (together with its Fascist and Bolshevik allies)
form liberal democracies.18 We can add here as an aside, that according to Giorgio Agamben, the
systematic use of the term movement to refer to what we have come to term “political movements”
emerged, precisely, with Nazism (although we begin to see the concept in the eighteenth century,
around the French Revolution).19
Nazism and liberalism are not unique in this appeal to movement as a defining criterion. I cannot
survey all other orders, ideologies, or political strands here, but we can briefly point to Marx’s
identification of modernity and capitalism with a powerful movement; to postmodernist appeals to
notions of hybridity and nomadism as symbolizing modes of movement that work counter to
modernist ideologies; or to frameworks seeing globalization as a system typified by a growing flow
of capital, culture, information and above all, people.
The point here is not to argue that these competing ideologies/orders share similar attributes. The
point is rather to illustrate the appeal of the notion of movement to politics and to political thinking.
It is not sufficient to dismiss this frequent appeal to the concept by claiming that all these are,
indeed, political movements. Firstly, because this would merely beg the question and call for a
previous question: why does the term “movement” emerge to describe this particular social and
political phenomenon. This question, as Agamben has recently argued, is yet to be answered.20 But
more importantly, “movement” in all the above descriptions is not used in order to point to the fact
that we have here but one instance of a particular category (“social/political movements”); this
would be redundant. Rather, it is used as a defining (and hence supposedly unique) attribute: it
supposes to create a distinction, to mark a difference (and not to point to a quality of taking part in a
shared attribute). The question thus remains: why “movement”?
8. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010); William
Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens,” Citizenship Studies 6:3
(2002).↩
9. To evoke John Torpey’s important work. See John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport:
Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).↩
10. John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport.↩
11. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New
York: Vintage Books, 1973); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 109.↩
12. William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens.”↩
13. L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 8.↩
14. Michael Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and 20th Century Progressive
Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 11 and 3.↩
15. Michael Freeden, Liberal Languages, 21-22.↩
16. Carl Schmitt, State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of the Political Unity: The
Question of Legality, ed. Simona Draghici (Corvallis, OR: Plutarch Press, 2001), 11-12.↩
17. Carl Schmitt, State, Movement, People, 18.↩
18. Carl Schmitt, State, Movement, People, 13.↩
19. Giorgio Agamben, “Movement.” http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben3.htm, accessed
March 2012.↩
20. Giorgio Agamben, “Movement.”↩

2.4 Reflections
The fourth, and last layer may begin to provide an answer to the above question. Some philosophers
think of politics qua movement. Standing as an opposition to nature, to stable power-structures, to a
static state bureaucracy, politics brings the potential carried by instability: the potential of change,
of widening the gaps allowing our agency, of redistributing resources, re-aligning power. A set of
different (even if tangential) traditions of thinking about the meaning of the political conceptualizes
the political as that which moves, as the moment of movement, or as that to which movement is
essential.
The political is the domain in which and upon which humans can act, which humans can change,
and which is thus defined as inherently unstable. Movement can take here the form of an earthquake
—a radical and rare upheaval (as in the case of Rancière ); of a repetitive (potentially slower and
more local) operation of undoing in which the movement of the individual body produces a
movement of categories—troubles the assumption of given-ness and stability (as in the case of
Butler); or as a space wherein the world is revealed as movable, as a space in which and through
which the world emerges as the substance, product, and target of action (as in the case of Arendt).
3. A Story: the Bloomer Movement
These four layers open up a vast terrain through which many different paths can be taken. In the
limited space I have here I want to try and outline merely one such possible path. Its contours can
be marked via an anecdote in the Foucauldian meaning of the term: a short story that nonetheless
captures something essential in the logics I set out to expose.21 It is a true story, whose protagonists
should be quite familiar to anyone with some background in the history of feminism. Being a story,
it has a clear point of beginning: it was one day in 1852, when Elizabeth Miller appeared on the
front lawn of her cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, dressed in what would later become known as
“the bloomer”: wide trousers that narrow at the ankles, covered by a knee-length skirt and a corset-
less top.
Stanton, one of the leading suffragists of what is often referred to as First Wave feminism, was
enthralled by the new dress. “To see my cousin,” she described it, “with a lamp in one hand and a
baby in the other, walk upstairs with ease and grace, while, with flowing robes, I pulled myself up
with difficulty, lamp and baby out of the question, readily convinced me that there was sore need of
reform in woman’s dress, and I promptly donned a similar attire.22 Following Stanton, many other
women’s rights supporters began wearing the new dress and a two year-long campaign for dress
reform got underway.
The campaign made two main claims: First, it was argued that the tight, heavy dresses of the period
caused severe damage to the bodies of women (lasting damage to their spine and many kinds of
nervous diseases) and must therefore be replaced with a new, emancipatory form of dress. Second,
and more significantly for our purpose, it was argued that the new dress was indeed emancipatory
because it enabled women to move freely. Stanton reported that the change of dress made her feel
“like a captive set free from his ball and chain.” She celebrated the new freedom the bloomer
bestowed upon her body: “I was always ready for a brisk walk throughout sleet and snow and rain,
to climb a mountain, jump over a fence, work in the garden . . . what a sense of liberty I felt with no
skirt to hold or brush.”23
This freedom of movement, however, was more than just a matter of leisure and enjoyment
(climbing a mountain or working in the garden). It was a matter of life and death (or at least, so it
was portrayed). When her son, who stayed at a boys’ boarding school, asked her not to visit him in
her new costume (since it was the target of much scorn and was considered quite scandalous),
Stanton pleaded with him to reconsider. She asked whether he would enjoy walking down the fields
with her when she arrived, and how he expected her to do so with her long and heavy old dress. But
even if she were able to take this walk with him, slowly and with much effort, what would happen,
she queried, if a bull suddenly ran towards them; how would she be able to run, jump behind a
fence, and preserve her life in that dress?24 Since this argument is so preposterous, one cannot but
wonder whether it is over-argued to make another point.
When we consider the bloomer episode against the history and symbolism of Victorian dressing,
this point may become apparent. What would become known as Victorian women’s dress came into
fashion in the eighteenth century together with the establishment of the separate spheres, as a mark,
as well as a technology, of confining upper and middle class women to the domestic sphere.25
Accordingly, the appeal for dress reform emphasized locomotion as a form and a symbol of
transgressing the private sphere and occupying an equal position in the public, economic, as well as
political spheres. Yet “symbol” may be too weak of a term here. At times it seemed that the dress
and the freedom of movement it enabled became the essence of women’s liberation. Gerrit Smith
(Elizabeth Miller’s father), a keen supporter of woman’s suffrage as well as the bloomer, went as far
as refusing to attend the 1856 Woman’s Rights Convention because most suffragists abandoned the
new dress:
I believe that poverty is the great curse of woman, and that she is powerless to assert her
rights, because she is poor. Woman must go to work and get rid of her poverty, but that
she cannot do in her present disabling dress, and she seems determined not to cast it
aside. She is unwilling to sacrifice grace and fashion, even to gain her right . . . Were
woman to adopt a rational dress, a dress that would not hinder her from any
employment, how quickly would she rise from her present degrading dependence on
man! How quickly would the marriage contract be modified and made to recognize the
equal rights of the parties to it! And how quickly would she gain access to the ballot-
box.26

Smith was not exceptional in these words. Similar arguments were repeated throughout the bloomer
episode. For two years then, the old style of dress became the emblem, the cause and the foundation
of all other types of women’s subjection—from economic dependency to the lack of the vote—and
a striking share of the debates concerning women’s political status suddenly passed through the
question of clothing and fashion, which was predominantly a question of physical mobility.

21. Adi Ophir, “The Semiotics of Power: Reading Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish,”
Manuscrito XII:2 (1989): 9-34.↩
22. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897 (New York:
Schocken Books, 1971), 201.↩
23. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 201.↩
24. Charles Neilson Gattey, The Bloomer Girls (New York: Coward-McCann, 1968), 60.↩
25. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2003), 27-30; Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” in On
Fashion, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1994), 183-184.↩
26. Cited in Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Indianapolis: The Bowen-
Merrill Company, 1899), 119.↩

4. Unpacking
The rest of this essay is devoted to unpacking this story in four points which wind between the four
layers outlined in 2.1-2.4. These points are by no means exhaustive in the effort to understand the
political bearings of movement. Yet they may begin to lay bare the different meanings of movement
in the long tradition on which Stanton draws and of which she is a part.
4.1. Three Definitions
(i). Movement is Liberal Freedom
(ii). Movement is a Privileged Mode through Which the Liberal Subject is Corporatized
(iii). Movement is a Condition for Rationality
Stanton had a long, rich, and at times paradoxical philosophy concerning women’s political status,
and simply classifying her as a “liberal feminist” would be misleading. Nevertheless, it is more or
less safe to argue that in the first half of the 1850s, during the time our story takes place, her
arguments were primarily based on a universalistic logic; focused more on equality than on
difference; sought primarily legal equality; and were translated into a form of activism that may
best be described as a performance of liberalism.27 Hence, I want to draw on this story to say
something about this discourse more broadly. My first claim is that we can see in the bloomer
episode a manifestation of Arendt’s brief claim that freedom of movement is the materialization of
the liberal concept of liberty.28
Hobbes identified freedom as but “the absence of . . . external impediments of motion.” It was
primarily “freedom from chains, and prison,” situated within a minimal matrix wherein the degree
of one’s freedom is a function of her available space for movement (“so that a man who is held in
custody in a large prison has more liberty than in a cramped one”).29 Accordingly, liberty was, for
Hobbes, an attribute of bodies alone. Applying the concept “to any thing but Bodies,” is an “abuse”
of the term according to Hobbes, “for that which is not the subject of Motion is not the subject of
Impediment.”30 Whereas the corpus of texts that would become the foundation of liberal thought
would propose more and more complex and nuanced accounts of freedom that can no longer be
reduced to this formulation, at least until the eighteenth century (and as we can see from the
bloomer story, to some extent also later) movement continues to serve as a pivot around which
liberal notions of freedom obtain material, concrete meanings.
Even Locke—the philosopher who identified freedom with law and with reason (rather than the
body), with stability, and even with enclosure—still saw movement as central to freedom. A man is
free, Locke argues in the Essay “so far as a man has a power to think, or not to think; to move or not
to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind.”31 One may maintain that the
words “according to the preference or direction of his own mind” re-situate the question of liberty
within the will, thereby sidelining movement. But Locke saw such an ascription of freedom to will
as an absurdity. Freedom, “which is but a power, belongs only to agents, and cannot be an attribute
of modification of the will, which is also but a power.”32 The relation between thinking and moving
in Locke is more complicated than I can account for here, but ultimately, his concept of freedom is
not reducible to volition and is very much attached to the power of locomotion.33
But the bloomer episode enables us to push the claim regarding freedom, movement, and liberalism
even further. Movement emerges here as the principle of the materialization of liberal subjectivity,
not merely liberal freedom. In other words, we can say that the subject at the core of liberal
discourse appears as a subject which is simultaneously corporeal and political—a concrete,
embodied political being—in the moments when he/she can be configured as a moving body.
Accordingly, in the bloomer campaign, amidst a struggle for political representation which was
often reduced to “the vote,” the moving body becomes a conduit through which other modes of
oppression could be attached to the body, and essentially corporeal problems (such as health) could
appear as political. Addressing the question of movement as a political “thing” is above all to ask
how our bodies affect, are affected by, become the vehicle of, or the addressees of political orders,
ideologies, institutions, relations, or powers. Asking this question in regard to liberalism entails
reading it against the common understanding of this political tradition, which assumes that
liberalism perceives and constructs subjects as essentially universal, abstract judicial entities.
The centrality of movement to liberal notions of freedom and citizenship demonstrates that we
cannot read these texts as simply putting forth an ontology of abstract subjectivity. My point in this
claim is not merely to rehearse the well-established critique that this figure was in fact racialized,
classed, or gendered. My point is rather that even within the logic of liberalism the subject at the
core of liberal theory has a corporeal dimension: the capacity of locomotion. Movement thus
becomes a “pivot of materialization” for the liberal body. Indeed, it is with imprisonment, with the
denial of liberty as the freedom of movement, that we first find the right of habeas corpus, the right
“to bring his body before the Court of King’s Bench or Common Pleas.”34 It is here that the body of
the subject enters the law almost literally, brought to the king’s court, to stand, as it were, in front of
the law.
Nevertheless, at the very moment the question of movement forces us to take the body into account
even when we consider classic liberalism, it also renders the body almost insignificant. The body
appears within this frame in a narrow, diluted form that is produced, precisely, by reducing it to a
change of position between given coordinates. Furthermore, the moving body (or to be more precise
some moving bodies; and we shall return to this “some” in 4.4) emerges as a form of rational body,
and it is not clear whether the mind/body dichotomy is disturbed or reproduced thereby. “To
preserve personal beauty,” writes Mary Wollstonecraft, “the limbs and faculties [of women] are
cramped with worse than Chinese bands and the sedentary life which they are condemned to live,
while boys frolic in the open air, weakens the muscles and relaxes the nerves.” This, in turn,
“naturally produces dependence of the mind.” In short, sitting down jeopardizes rationality. Indeed,
“most of the women, in the circle of my observation, who have acted like rational creatures, or
shown any vigour of intellect, have accidently been allowed to run wild.”35
Here resides the third definition of this section: Motion (and more accurately – the movements of
limbs) was not simply the materialization of freedom, and not simply the privileged mode by which
the liberal subject was corporealized, but the corporeal condition for rationality itself (and perhaps it
was the first two because it was also the latter.) This definition, may be further supported by
Barbara Arneil’s claim that western political thought assumes a connection between rationality and
ability. Arneil seems to be quite perplexed by what she sees as a reoccurring “conflation of physical
and mental disabilities” and concludes that “there is something about disability itself and not simply
the principle of “irrationality” that leads some liberal theorists to exclude all disabled people from
their principles of justice.”36 She traces this “something” to narratives of tragedy and loss, yet I
propose that there is a way to link rational and physical modes of disability without recourse to
notions of memory and narrative. These lines from Wollstonecraft (or similar lines from Locke’s
Thoughts Concerning Education) enable us to either further refine, or somewhat revise, Arneil’s
conclusion: the in/ability to move is assumed to have implications as to one’s rationality.37

27. “Performance” in the Butlerian meaning of the concept. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender (New York: Routledge, 1990).↩
28. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Hannah Arendt, Men in
Dark Times (London: Cape, 1970).↩
29. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 145 and 147, respectively; Thomas Hobbes, De Cive 9.9, in
Hobbes and Republican Liberty, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 116-17. The translation in The English Works suggests a slightly different formulation: “And
every man hath more or less Liberty, as he hath more or less space in which he employs himself: as
he hath more Liberty, who is in a large, than he that is kept in a close prison.” See Thomas Hobbes,
The English Works (London: John Bohn, 1841), ii:120.↩
30. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 146.↩
31. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin Books, 1997),
II.21.8.↩
32. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.21.13.↩
33. Locke makes this claim most explicitly in his thought-experiment he proposes on the man
locked in a room with a good friend. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
II.21.10.↩
34. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765),
131.↩
35. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the Rights of Women (Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift
Edition, 1996), 77, 41, and 42 respectively (my emphasis).↩
36. Barbara Arneil, “Disability, Self Image, and Modern Political Theory,” Political Theory 37:2
(2009): 224.↩
37. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1996), 15-
16.↩

4.1.1 A Lexical Pause

By the turn of the nineteenth century, this concept of freedom as movement changes. Whereas in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the liberty of the liberal subject anchored him to his moving
body, by the end of the eighteenth century liberty is largely attached to reason, and the will emerges
as the substance of freedom. What is significant in this change is not merely that the “element”
within man to which freedom is attached shifts; the important difference is that for many later
liberals “man’s will is himself.”38 The subject becomes abstract thereby. As we see in the case of
the bloomers or Wollstonecraft, movement remains a privileged form through which the subject
appears as corporeal in the liberal political sphere even when freedom is conceived in more abstract
terms.
Nevertheless, these appearances become interruptions; a mode through which the body emerges on
a surface that is characterized by the attempt to erase the body rather than the very rule of this
surface. It is therefore not surprising that, as the examples above indicate, many of these moments
occurred in tandem with another mode of disturbing the political surface of liberalism: gendering
the liberal subject. Either way, by Rawls’s time, freedom of movement is so marginalized, it is
altogether absent from his list of “basic rights and liberties.”39 I elaborate about this process
elsewhere and cannot do so here.40 All this is brought here to demonstrate a different point, namely,
that the argument of this section cannot be that “movement is the principle of materialization of
liberal freedom (or subjectivity; or rationality),” but rather, “movement was such a principle and
now it is something else.” “Movement”—or any concept, for that matter—is always given within
some sequence of “was,” “is” (for now) and “may become,” as well as of “here” and “there.”
4.2 “Layers” of Meanings
In the context of the bloomer campaign, “mobility” has a double meaning: the physical movement
of human bodies, as well as social mobility; the crossing of a doorstep and a transgression of a
“sphere.” Yet much like we saw with Plato, these meanings, which can perhaps be marked as the
literal and the metaphorical, collapse here into one. The social mobility is a function of the physical
ability to walk, climb upstairs, or run in a field, and these physical movements are the manifestation
(the result, but also the meaning) of a social transgression.
At the edge of this symbiosis of meanings stands the notion of the body-politic. In her history of the
concept, Adriana Cavarero refers to it as a “metaphor,” yet often this metaphor is, once again, taken
quite literally. Hobbes, who was to a great degree a philosopher of motion, is perhaps the best
example for this literal understanding.41 For Hobbes, the materiality of the body-politic and its
movement was indispensible. The state-as-a-body may be artificial, yet in a cosmos in which nature
can be imitated by “the Art of man,” in which the Heart is “but a Spring,” and in which,
accordingly, Automata can be seen as having “artificial life since life is but the motion of limbs,” in
a cosmos, in short, in which God himself operates like a clockmaker, the separation between the
organic and the artificial does not hold. The Hobbesian commonwealth is a giant moving man; a
union of all the people “that moves with one will.”42
But we do not have to go all the way with the frontispiece of Leviathan in order to claim that
thinking about politics necessitates us to constantly shift between the material and the metaphorical,
between thinking about the act of people coming together, the congregation of bodies in particular
spaces (be it the state or the city square), the negotiations of change and stability, the formation of a
community, and even more so—the formation of a community through which change becomes
possible (or at least conceivable). All these movements (and all these meanings of the concept) are
eventually tangled together. In the case of the bloomer episode we see how a certain appearance in
space, a certain movement through space is a way of re-forming and challenging both a symbolic
and a spatial order that are almost one and the same: a certain gendered order, an order of identity
categories and political hierarchies, that is also an order of an “inside” and “outside.”
4.3 Imperial Movements
To make the third point I should return to the end of the bloomer story. After two years in which any
public appearance with the bloomer resulted in much scorn and contempt, Stanton and her friends
abandoned the new dress. Stanton explains:
[T]o escape constant observation, criticism, ridicule, and persecution, one after another
gladly went back to the old slavery, and sacrificed freedom of movement to respect. I
have never wondered since that the Chinese women allow their daughter’s feet to be
encased in iron shoes, for great are the penalties of those who dare resist the behests of
the tyrant Custom.43

The image of the bounded feet of Chinese girls—which Stanton evokes here and which seems to
hound political philosophers at least since the seventeenth century—marks more than a lack of
freedom illustrated through an image of disabled mobility.44 It also situates freedom as movement
within an imperial context. In Stanton, as well as in Wollstonecraft or Mill before her, a contrast of
sedentary respectability and mobile freedom becomes the mold through which gender and spatial
(or racial) hierarchies are superimposed on each other.
With this superimposition the lack of mobility appears not as the manifestation and means of
oppression of a certain minority, but as the fate of the many, indeed, the fate of “the greater part of
the world,” as Mill would put it.45 Once again then, much along the lines we identified in Plato, the
disabled movement of the many is tied to the protection of both knowledge and political order (in
Mill’s case: enlightenment; also as a schema of global governance). As Uday Metha has noted, the
liberal justification of the empire relies on the argument that since most of the world has lost its own
capacity of movement, without Europe’s mobile (almost motorist) powers, the rest of the world
would not be able to move (read: improve). Progress in its global articulation “is like having a
stalled car towed by one that is more powerful and can therefore carry the burden of an ascendant
gradient.”46

38. Thomas Hill Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, and Other Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37.↩
39. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).↩
40. Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: A History of a Political Problem
(forthcoming).↩
41. Adriana Cavarero, Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).↩
42. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 9; Adriana Cavarero, Stately Bodies, 165.↩
43. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 204.↩
44. In her books on the practice Dorothy Ko notes that this “visceral” image began to circulate in
China around that time, in travelogues, plays, popular songs, and novels. c.f. especially Dorothy Ko,
Cinderella’s Sisters, A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007), ch. 5. One may speculate that these descriptions soon found their way to Europe.↩
45. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 70.↩
46. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 81-82 and 94.↩

The crushed and squeezed feet of girls in China, bounded and hindering movement, thus serve to
mark both a gendered and a global divide between those who can move freely, and thus rule, and
those whose movement is hindered, and thus cannot. Indeed, Tim Cresswell shows that this binary
stands at the core of liberal citizenship. Whereas the mobility of citizens is almost sanctified as a
right, and is taken to construct “autonomous individual agents who, through their motion, [help] to
produce the nation itself,” there are always “unspoken Others [who] are differently mobile”; others
whose mobility is “constantly hindered.” Cresswell points to “African Americans ‘driving while
black’” or Arab Americans stopped at airport immigration; I cannot but add: Palestinians stopped at
checkpoints, but also anti-capitalism demonstrators arrested on bridges.47
This desire to restrain movement also reminds us that on the other side of this dyad—in which we
have the free citizen on one side, and “stagnant nations of the east” or women in domestic chains
(both draw on Mill’s formulations) on the other—were colonial images of nomadism that served to
justify similar modes of expansion (predominantly to America and later in Africa and the Middle
East).48 This returns us to 4.1 and calls us to refine the definition of the liberal subject I proposed
there. The subject at the core of liberalism was not simply a subject who could move without any
limitation; such movement was seen rather as erupting savagery, or in other contexts: disrupting
vagrancy. The classic liberal subject was rather a subject who learned to tame her own movements
and thus to allow the notion of an ordered freedom, and whose movement was contained by a
certain background of stability—property, estate, or state.
There is a dual movement here of both the argument (my argument) and the technique (the political
technology; the regulation of movement): on the one level, a disciplining of movement on the level
of the subject itself, her body and her mind—if the two can still be thought separately; a taming of
freedom as Mehta would have it.49 On the other level, a global distribution of movements that
produce the metropolitan, the colony, and the networks that constitute them as simultaneously
connected and separated. The management of the movements of colonized, colonizers, those who
cannot quite fall into any of these categories (white vagrants, convicted felons, unindustrialized
poor), and the material infrastructure and products of rule: a huge “population” of both people and
things, whose circulation, movements, but also immobilities and rootedness, had to be monitored,
incited, tamed and regulated. Between these two levels—and this is the crucial point and the main
benefit, I believe, of looking at this liberal-colonial operation from the perspective of movement—
there was (still is) a constant diffusion. The structures and logics of one keep taking shape within
and re-inform the other. The schisms within the subject that needs to be unified are also mapped to
the global level, and the political technologies developed in one are then imported—or deported—to
the other.
But let us return to the Chinese feet (or rather: take them as yet another point of departure.) The
practice taking place at the far end of the empire—at the edge of the global terrain in which
movement becomes a question of rule—soon emerges within the very desires that constitute
European individuals: The European standard, Mill argues, is “to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal
of character is to be without any marked character; to maim by compression, like a Chinese lady’s
foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently.”50 Europe may thus “become
another China,” that is “stationary.”51
This infiltration, however, was mutual: not only did the stagnation of the East infiltrate Europe, the
movement of Europe also permeated the East. We saw this latter diffusion with the quote from
Mehta above, and more concretely we may state that this movement, whose goal was to “gradually
[train] the people [of the East] to walk alone,” depended upon a pervasive imperial governance—
and thus upon the movement of Englishmen and women (governors, bureaucrats) to the colonies,
and later of selected elites among the colonized to England and back.52 These movements were
accompanied by another movement Mill desired to see organized and systematized: the movement
of England’s poor into settler colonies. Mill’s answer to what he saw as another stagnation—a
stagnation of European labor markets (accompanied by what he saw as a growing moral deformity
among the working class)—was immigration to the colonies.53 Thus the question is—always is—
whose movement (Englishmen but not Irishmen, to take just one distinction), and what is moved
(people but not sentiments, as Stoler shows in a different colonial context.54
Moving: changing locations, expanding administrating functions, trading, shipping goods and
circulation capital; being moved: being traded as slaves, deported as felons—all was part of a never
ending, self-nourishing, circulation of movement (a “sanguification,” in Hobbes’s words, as we
shall soon see and as Gil Anidjar further shows and situates in a much wider matrix of flows and
circulation).55 Within this circulation we must also account for the developments and attachments,
and their regulation—feeling at home, being moved by a place and its people. As Ann Stoler’s
attentive reading in colonial archives has shown, what “moves” people is often part of the
calculation of the movements of both colonized and colonizers within and across the colonial map:
governors, merchants, local populations, coquinas, “mixed” children, or care-givers. All had to be
attached to certain localities (the colony or the metropolitan) and not to others, to certain people and
not others.56 The fear of attachments or the need to foster “proper” attachments—“proper” modes
of “being moved”—thus further increased the circulation into, out of, and between the colonies and
the “motherland.”
“Affective movements,” then, had to be tamed too, alongside—and as a part of—the movements of
populations around the world and the local movements of individual bodies. Returning, in order to
conclude, to the latter, we should emphasize that it is this tamed movement that is the principle of
materialization of the liberal subject, as a political subject who learned to narrow her spatial
presence, decelerate the franticness of her body, restrain and contain liberty itself. After all, the first
model for this subject was Hobbes’s servant: the person who agreed to limit herself (“not to run
away”) so to not be limited by others.57 I return to this point in 4.4. Stanton’s paragraph, which
already enables us to identify that this limitation of movement can never be thought of as merely
self-limitation and is always also social, poses China as a mirror. It thereby allows one dichotomy to
quake—that between east and west—in order to foreground another dichotomy: that between men
and their freedom on the one hand, and women and their oppression on the other. Yet in Mill, the
gender dichotomy is itself somewhat fragile and the Chinese practice of foot-binding is invoked to
reflect European custom in general. Through this multiply foreign body (gendered, racialized, and
geographically distanced) Western freedom itself emerges as a form of binding.

47. Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge,
2006), 161.↩
48. In Edward Said’s words: “Among the supposed juridical distinctions between civilized and non-
civilized peoples was an attitude toward land, almost a doxology about land which non-civilized
people supposedly lacked. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it
meant something to him; on it accordingly he bred useful arts and crafts, he created, he
accomplished, he built. For an uncivilized people land was either farmed badly (i.e., inefficiently by
Western standards) or it was left to rot. From this string of ideas, by which whole native societies
who lived on American, African, and Asian territories for centuries were suddenly denied their right
to live on that land, came the great dispossessing movements of modem European colonialism . . .
Land in Asia, Africa, and the Americas was there for European exploitation, because Europe
understood the value of land in a way impossible for the natives.” Edward Said, “Zionism from the
Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text 1 (1979): 26-27.↩
49. Uday Singh Mehta, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke’s Political
Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).↩
50. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 72.↩
51. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 69. (emphases added)↩
52. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1869), 50.↩
53. For Mill’s view on this project see Duncan Bell, “John Stuart Mill on Colonies,” Political
Theory 38:1 (2010): 34-64. Bell claims that Mill “was wary of unregulated flows of people; rational
order was necessary to maximize utility.” Thus, “Emigration should be neither a piecemeal
voluntaristic process nor a crude attempt to ‘shovel out paupers,’ but instead part of a coordinated
state-sponsored scheme of colonization” (39-40).↩
54. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), Chapter 3.↩
55. Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (forthcoming).↩
56. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, Ch. 3. See also her Race and the Education of
Desire (Durham, Duke University Press, 1995).↩
57. The servant, unlike the slave or the captive, is not bound with chains (or confined within the
walls of the prison). To put it differently, he can move freely. And second, unlike the others, the
servant has conveyed, “either in expressed words, or by other sufficient signs,” a will. The servant
had agreed to his situation. The two, consent and movement, are what makes him free and they
cannot be separated: consent can be inferred precisely from the lack of bondage. Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, 141.↩

4.4 Stability
Movement—in its varied meanings, attached to various objects, circulating between the metaphoric
and the concrete—has been celebrated as a manifestation of freedom. At the same time, movement
was always also an interruption of order. It is this interruption that has rendered the state “the enemy
of ‘people who move around.’”58 In the seventeenth century, with early modern formulations of the
idea that the state can either “be” free or promote freedom, these two configurations of movement
came into conflict. The main challenge of liberalism was to craft a concept of order that was
reconcilable with its concept of freedom. As Otto Mayr shows, a model for addressing this
challenge was found within a set of discoveries in the natural sciences demonstrating that under
certain conditions, dynamic systems can regulate and maintain themselves.
This model—which proliferated in the second half of the sixteenth century and peaked, mostly
among British liberal writers, after the revolution of 1688—allowed liberalism to imagine an
ordered freedom. For Mayr, the determining factor within this new model was the lack of external
intervention. I propose that no less crucial was the possibility to think of a moderated, self-regulated
movement. This was not merely a mechanical model; it was also an organizational model that stood
at the foundation of modernity’s concepts of law and state, as well as modernity’s new modes of
power. This model composed the liberal concept of freedom we encountered in 4.1. With it,
movement no longer manifested “a restless and inassimilable alterity busily working both within
and against state power’s most cherished idea: social order.”59 Rather, it was conceived as the
manifestation (and precondition) of a free social order.
Plato may serve to demonstrate, not the “roots” of, but perhaps more accurately the pervasiveness
of the framework tying together moderated movement to freedom, and presumably-excessive
movement to problems of security (a configuration of movement unbound as a threat). He sets the
stage for the idea that freedom is only politically valuable if it relies on some mechanisms that
would regulate the movement that manifests it. The idea that such mechanisms can be internal to
the subject, who can thereby achieve within himself some equilibrium between movement
(freedom) and stability (security), would become more and more systematically theorized in writers
from Locke to Kant, from Hobhouse to neo-liberals; it would become concretely plausible with an
array of disciplinary mechanisms which stands at the basis of Foucault’s primary object of research.
But the argument is, of course, more complex. It is not merely that movement had to be restrained,
and that to be reconciled with freedom it had to be, at least to some extent, self restrained. Such an
ability of self-regulation was not assumed to be the share of all subjects. A series of splits across
temporal, racial, geographic, class, and gender lines has dissected the regulated and ordered
movement of able and masculine European bodies, which was configured as freedom from other
movements (movements which were deemed somehow improper and were often thus conceived of
as a threat). Time and again, we find that “home,” location, rootedness, and other factors that render
movement desirable are somehow reserved for white (often male and upper or middle class)
subjects.
Notwithstanding varied models of localization, Africans, Indigenous Americans, or Asians, as well
as women or poor, appear in the texts of liberal thinkers as either too stagnant or too mobile.
Perhaps, these are the assumptions that stand at the base of the arc of colonies identified by Ann
Stoler as “a principle of managed mobilities” in which poor, vagrant, criminals (categories which
were often conflated), colonized, exiled, and “otherwise dis-abled” were subjected to “amplified
political logics of security [and] reform.” The colony, as a non-stable space for the management, re-
taming, confinement, containment, disciplining, and re-forming movement, came to address (but
also demonstrate, and thereby construct) the presumably dangerous and wild movements of the
many groups of colonized (in an opposition, as Stoler puts it, to “the normative conventions of
‘free’ settlement, and [to] a normal population”).60
Many of these groups, and perhaps above all those marked as “savages,” were seen as lacking a
political space in which movement can be (self-) regulated. The threat constantly posed to their own
security, as well as the threat they themselves pose to others, could therefore presumably be
diminished if one of two solutions were to be implemented: domestication (a project of confining
movement to facilitate processes of “civilization”—a process whose end should be the re-formation
of the “savages” in the mold of the liberal subject) or occupation (an external control and restraint).
At least to a certain extent, the colonial project is the outcome of fusing these two “solutions.”
With this split, movement emerges as more than a physical phenomenon. It emerges as a right. It is
a right which is simultaneously the right to move and the right to stay put: those who have an estate
(a home, a nation state), those who have the material conditions allowing them to stay where they
are, could enjoy the right to move freely. Lisa Malkki identifies a “sedentarist metaphysics of
rootedness” which is contrasted by Tim Creswell to a metaphysics of movement.61 I want to
propose that rather than competing metaphysics, we have here complementary processes. First,
citizenship has to rely on a process of “taming mobility,” which serves to support the sedentarist
ideology of a nation state within a factuality wherein people are, and were, always mobile. Second,
once this image of stability is established for particular categories of now-“rooted” people, it serves
to facilitate their growing mobility. Finally, these categories of movement and stability are formed
vis-à-vis other groups, which are simultaneously presumably-less-rooted, and yet constantly
hindered. The immigrant, the nomad, and a certain mode of what we have come to term hybrid-
subjectivity, all represent subject positions which are perceived as and through their mobility, but
which often rather inhabit spaces of confinement: detention and deportation camps, modern
incarnations of poor houses, “international” zones at airports.
Different “figures of mobility” thus become the foundation upon which different modes of
governance are produced.62 “Different modes of governance,” we must keep in mind, are integral
to liberal logic, which has always incorporated regimes and technologies of deportation, expulsion,
expropriation, confinement and enclosure into its framework of democracy and freedom.

58. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 1.↩
59. Such a characterization of movement, here quoted from De Genova’s description of free
movement, is quite common. See Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Mae Peutz, The Deportation
Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 58-59.↩
60. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colony,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon.
http://www.politicalconcepts.org, accessed March 2012.↩
61. Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of
National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7:1 (1992).↩
62. Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Mae Peutz, The Deportation Regime, 129.↩

5. Final Notes: The Movement of the Leviathan

Movement is the change in the position of a body (object or subject) or part of it over the course of
a certain interval of time. This was the definition with which I started. To a certain extent, at least,
all of the uses of the concept through which I passed mark such a change, even if the concepts of
“body” or “position” may take different forms and meanings across these uses. Accordingly, a
social or political movement (to begin to answer the question ending 2.3) is a certain plurality
mobilized into action or organized under a shared cause/ideology. The appeal to “movement” may
seek to denote, precisely, the formation of a political body by the means of this organization—be it
the body of the social movement of the state or of some “multitude.”
These movements, moreover, seek to redirect the course of the body-politic, its policies, and
political sentiments (the issues which move people; in the double, perhaps triple meaning of the
word). Other movements (such as the occupation movement, but also many forms of activism that
can no longer be captured within the traditional concepts of social movements) seek rather to
interrupt the ordinary movement of things (life, politics). Sit-ins, occupying public spaces, chaining
one’s body to a bulldozer to prevent house demolitions—all are modes of action that operate by
bringing to a halt the habitual movement of the everyday, or what have become the unquestioned
movements of political powers. Or, alternatively, we can follow Agamben to argue that this use of
the concept seeks to mark the dynamic powers in society, in an opposition to the staticity of the
state.
Yet contra Agamben we can further argue that states are not necessarily static. Often, they can be
seen as moving bodies as well, and their movement, too, is a change of position in space:
expansion. This movement is precisely the matter empires are made of. Once again Hobbes may
provide the key. The Leviathan is but a giant moving body whose movement is dual: the vital, more
internal movement of blood/money, and the external movement of war.63 As Anidjar points out in
the previous issue of this journal, the circulation of money is what keeps the body of the Leviathan
alive.64 Firstly, the “reduction” of commodities into “Gold, and Silver and Mony” makes them
portable enough “as not to hinder the motion of men from place to place”; almost as if a circulation
of full-scale commodities would create clogs in the veins of the commonwealth. Commerce, which
is thereby enabled, thus provides the necessary nourishment to the entire body politic: it “goes
round about, Nourishing (as it passeth) every part thereof.”65 Yet unlike the blood in mortal men,
this blood does not flow in a closed system. On the contrary, the reduction of commodities into
blood/money is necessary in order to allow its flow beyond and outside of the boundaries of the
commonwealth:
For Gold and Silver, being (as it happens) almost in all Countries of the world highly
valued, is a commodious measure of the value of all things else between nations . . . By
the means of which measures, all commodities, Movable, and Immoveable, are made to
accompany a man, to all places of his resort, within and without the place of his
ordinary residence.66

Moreover, the need to sustain this circulation sets in motion other parts of the body politics, which
has to reach out, beyond its borders, to obtain more of this vital power.
Silver and Gold . . . have the privilege to make Common-wealths move, and stretch out
their arms, when need is, into foreign Countries; and supply, not only private Subjects
that travel, but also whole Armies with Provision.67

Often, this practice of “reaching out” produces more blood; both blood-money, which can be
acquired via the resources of the new territories, and that red fluid which is shed in wars.
Violence, war, conquest, colonization, life (which is, for Hobbes, “but the motion of limbs”),
reproduction (as “The Procreation, or Children of a Common-wealth, are those we call Plantations,
or Colonies”), all become part of a single, even if multifaceted movement of the commonwealth.68
As we saw, however, this unimpeded movement is also the definition of freedom. Freedom itself
thus emerges as a form of violence, as a threat to be managed, monitored, constantly under
surveillance. At the level of bodies, populations or states, movement folds these into each other.
As a physical phenomenon, an iconography, an image, or a concept, movement thus appears as a
fundamental political matter. Thus, when Arendt identified politics as a space in which “each man
moves among his peers” and via this movement negotiates the conditions of life in a plurality, she
identified more than some ideal-type of a Greek political model.69 She identified a certain image of
politics that is more widely shared, as well as more diverse, than she cared to admit.

Hagar Kotef is a Post-Doc fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. She works on
political theory, specializing in feminist theory, early liberal philosophy, women’s activism and
contemporary Continental philosophy. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Tel Aviv
University in 2009. Her dissertation, titled Tracing the Political Body, analyzes the politicization of
the body in First Wave liberal feminism. She is currently working on developing her dissertation
into a book and on a new manuscript on movement and its political meanings.

63. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 149. For Plato, as well, motion is totalized as war via “an
unproblematic treatment of war as coextensive with motion, indeed, as the moving of bodies.”
Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life and War, 153.↩
64. Gil Anidjar, “Blood,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon.
http://www.politicalconcepts.org, accessed March 2012.↩
65. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 174.↩
66. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 174.↩
67. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 175.↩
68. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 9; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 175; Indeed, “an unstoppable wave
linking state systems to colonial ones, a surging flow and flood of money and blood.” Gil Anidjar,
“Christians and Money,” Ethical Perspectives 12:4 (2005): 505.↩
69. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 117. (my italics)↩