In relation to her forthcoming book on the politics of contemporary performance, Julie Pellegrin explores the hypothesis of a relationship between performative and anarchist practices. With this series of lectures, she intends to engage in an exercise of speculative anatomy based on the “Members and the Stomach” and the fiction of the dissociated body suggested by the fable of La Fontaine.

As a good moralist, Jean de La Fontaine was prompt to call the strikers to order and put them back on the right path – that of work and the body of the state. But if the members had not obeyed, what alternative anatomy could they have generated? By refusing to be one with authority, what new alliances could they have imagined? Could this body, decomposed and then recomposed according to the principle of free association, have been qualified as anarchist?

The organic metaphor between the individual and the social body, as mentioned in the fable, has proved to be increasingly popular since the 19th century, including among anarchists. But for the latter, it allows us to rethink redesign the relationship between the individual and society in terms of interdependence, and not opposition or representation.

Some artistic practices offer non-hierarchical forms of relationship to the self and to the community, through a complex work of composition. This first session will be an opportunity to think with them to understand what ungovernable bodies they make possible, and to outline some elements of reflection around refusal, disorder, heterogeneity, free will and reciprocity.