The Suffering Body as Territory of Power: Biopolitics, Precariousness and Alterity in the Experience of Street Dwellers in Santiago de Cali

Abstract

What happens to the body of those who live on the street? This seemingly simple question calls for three simultaneous philosophical registers, none of which, taken separately, is sufficient to answer it. To this end, we propose to interpret the experience of fifteen street dwellers in Santiago de Cali, based on empirical materials produced through photovoice between 2020 and 2022, through the lens of biopolitics and the analytics of power in Michel Foucault, the ontology of precarity and the theory of grief in Judith Butler, and the phenomenology of alterity in Emmanuel Levinas. These frameworks are not applied sequentially; rather, they interrogate one another, as each reveals what the others do not fully capture.

The central argument is as follows: the body of the street dweller operates as a territory of power—that is, as a surface upon which the mechanisms of urban exclusion are inscribed—yet that same body simultaneously constitutes a site of resistance, of meaning-making, and of irreducible ethical demand. The analysis shows how, in the voices and images of the participatory process—from Chapita’s “rotten apples” to Marcus’s “thank you for seeing me”—there converge the logic of biopolitical abandonment, the production of lives deemed ungrievable, and the ethical interpellation of the face of the Other: three dimensions of a single experience that only the articulation of these three frameworks renders intelligible. The conclusion is that a philosophically informed psychosocial intervention cannot dispense with any of these registers, and that photovoice operates not only as a methodological technique but also as a device that intervenes in the normative frameworks of visibility that urban biopolitics produces.