[CHAPTER ONE]
Introduction:
Being and Forms of Life
In this book, I seek to elaborate on the intuition that the understanding of what power is lies in its ontological foundation, i.e. that insofar as we are and to the degree that we are, we have power. But we are always in a particular way according to our actions and guiding principles. That is to say, we are (and are continually in) our form of life. The latter insofar as a particular way of being implies a certain power to be who one wants to be, so that a form of life is always the imposition of a particular way of being and acting (shared with a community). In this specific sense that I give to the term ‘imposing’ as that of affirming one’s being through activity, the form of life that imposes itself always does so politically, that is, by affirming itself through the organisation of activity and of one’s own life as a whole, taking here politics in the Aristotelian sense as that which gives form to life. A form of life is thus always the imposition of a particular way of acting on/by the subjects to organize their lives. And imposition indirectly refers to the will, which is why it is essential to understand this imposition as a free and voluntary act. In order to do so, I will discuss the relationship between being and will within the tradition from which I draw my inspiration. The task I set myself is to examine the concept of the form of life, already discussed in my previous works, in the light of its political dimension. In doing so, I seek to show that not only are power and life fused as the Spinozist-Nietzschean tradition already claimed, but that to live is always to do so by imposing a particular, non-natural or essential way of being and to expect it from or to posit it on the other individuals with whom we come into contact.
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DANIEL RUEDA GARRIDO