Global Thoughtlessness, the Social Contract and the Double Bodied Female Other in the Cypriot Imaginary

Abstract

This paper explores the persistence of an image - that of the double bodied other - in the minds of Cypriots. The deleterious effects of such an imaginative construction on the lives of foreign female workers, as well as its political and ontological roots constitute the two main areas of focus of this paper. Reducing persons to a compressed assortment of body parts has the effect of dehumanizing them and by extension morally justifying their exploitation. What grounds such imaginings politically can be found in the thinking of classic social contract theories that provide the moral and political foundation for the treatment of certain groups of people as non-human sub-persons. In addition, an ontological approach to these same questions, points to a global way of thinking, that aims to master the world in which we live by turning it into a picture; a global thoughtlessness, that provides the ontological conditions for such monstrous imaginings, yet one that bears within itself the seeds for its own collapse.