Give Me Back My Body
Give Me Back My Body

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, the recently revived interest for the body, its pointing out as an opposite to thought (particularly the speculative one), consciousness, mind, etc., and its strategic importance for so many types of critique of rationality, are examined and questioned. In that line, the genuineness, the relevance, as well as the object and the goal of this interest, are placed under scrutiny. The often repeated insistence on the body, present in those who tend to offer discourses which would be alternative to the existing theoretical, scientific and artistic ones, appear to be highly problematic. For, instead of being different and alternative, almost all contemporary forms of this care for the body, and consequently, most of the attempts of its rehabilitation and emancipation from the ideology of reason and sense, have become a sort of ideology very much similar to those proper to speculative thought and its universe. Thus, recycling, ecology, health, fitness etc., are being used as means and forms of domination over human body, and they are not less repressive or exclusive than the old institutions and ideas. What’s more, the body of such (“carnal”) ideology seems identical to the body of modern speculative, political, economical and cultural systems: it is conceived as a corpse. This, then, throws a somewhat different light on the alleged “alternative” character of the “new” discourses, and puts in question the very possibility of the relationship between discursiveness and corporeality - the immediate consequence of which is the ambiguous and fluid character of the body, represented in the problem of its unity/plurality.

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