La calle como espacio (bio)político: Perspectivas teóricas para la reflexión

Abstract

The street is a ‘common place’. People go through it anonymously each day on their way to work, study, leisure or shelter. But people also take the street with specific identities as citizens, workers, students. When this occurs, the street is no longer a transit spacebut becomes a space for political action and encounter: the street is the stage of an action that overflows the institutions when they either require popular support or turn out to be unable to give answer to people’s demands. However, it is relevant to ask whether the street could be something else than an anonymous passage between two places with an identity of their own, or the place for scenes of exceptional force or power. Due to the fact that homeless people live in the streets, for instance, the street becomes a point of tension in the dichotomy between the public and the private.On the other hand, bringing in the notion of the common also tensions the dichotomy and contributes to enrich the approach to the subject. The hypothesis of this paper is that the street plays a complex role in power relations and mechanisms especially if we bring the biopolitics conception into the discussion. Those offer a good standpoint to reflect on the political and biopolitical meaning of the street. Together with Negri, Agamben and Esposito, the paper aims to explore the street as a political space as well as the theoretical tensions that rise around it as a limit between the public and the private, and as a space of constitution of the common with the action of the multitude.