The definition and boundaries of the political have received considerable attention in recent times in political science, perhaps as a result of the wavering confidence in the scientific status of the knowledge that the discipline creates. However, a conspicuous absence continues to haunt mainstream political science, one that if rectified threatens, in some ways, to broaden both the nature of the political still further and to challenge the very division of knowledge into the social and natural sciences. This absence is the human body and this article seeks to ask after its exclusion and to suggest that its exclusion is both political and needs rectifying. I argue that the exclusion of the body in political science is a consequence of an inadequate ontological short cut, which is accepted (mostly) unquestioningly by political analysts and which has severe epistemological and methodological consequences. I suggest that a more reflective consideration of the body and its dynamic interplay with the mind could offer the discipline a greater understanding of the human subject, as well as alter power-knowledge relations.
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