Decentering the Natural Body: Making Difference Matter

One may not always be in agreement with the acerbic literary critic Terry Eagleton, but he certainly has a way with words. Reviewing for the London Review of Books one of the vast genre of recent publications on the body, he states: “There will soon be more bodies in contemporary criticism than on the fields of Waterloo. Mangled members, tormented torsos, bodies emblazoned or incarcerated, disciplined or desirous”; concerned that a move is afoot to dispense with the idea of subjectivity entirely, he notes the existence of “a glamorous kind of materialism about body talk, which compensates for certain more classical strains of materialism in dire trouble.” ¹

This provocative statement leads us, of course, into hot water. First, as Eagleton’s choice of adjectives indicates, the new meretricious body he is referring to is a body of style and form, a body of surfaces in which many of the differences we have internalized during the course of the twentieth century—gender, ethnicity, class, age—are marginalized or even erased. These chic bodies portray the sentiment of our times; their primary purpose, in critical theory at least (Eagleton suggests), is to decenter the “unhoused intellect” favored by philosophers and others to whom “‘mind’ is still a sexy notion.” ² Talking and writing about bodies—that is, about body surfaces, “exteriority without depth” ³ —is, some would argue, a last-ditch effort to dispose of the ghost in the machine, an effort that, in Eagleton’s opinion, risks settling for subjectivity itself as no more than a humanist myth. Then meaning simply becomes the material.

No matter how much we seek to decenter, deface, or erase prior representations, however, the body refuses to be pinned down, with or without the soul/mind intact. Further, the cultish bodies sprinkled throughout literary criticism and cultural studies, with a few notable exceptions, although they appear strikingly new in their brashness and violence, pursue a familiar course—one that the philosopher Russell Keat noted some time ago, in which “a good deal of time [is spent] discussing the distinctiveness of human beings, at the same time holding an assumption about the nondistinctiveness of the human body.” ⁴ Discourses about body surfaces, about body sculpting, sexual preference, cosmetics, piercing, tattooing, anorexia, and so on, inform us, often brilliantly and provocatively, about the normalization in popular culture of dominant ideologies for social life and about resistances to them, resistances that at times transcend anomie, and move toward a creative body politics; but the interiority of the body usually remains all the while “black-boxed” (in the idiom of the sociologists of science), a tedious universal, and therefore consigned to the biological sciences.

The body is elusive on several counts, the first being that it cannot be fully and satisfactorily represented, but neither can it be experienced in a void, without representation. Eagleton’s title repeats that which has already been noted many times: “It is not quite true that I have a body, and not quite true that I am one either.” We construct and interpret bodies through representations of one kind and another, and up to a point subjectivity is produced by those representations—but not entirely. The psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, concerned about the usual rendering passive of the body in contemporary medical practice, argues for “the body’s insistence on meaning”: attention should be paid to the way in which the body “presents” itself in “substance and action,” rather than simply being an implement for reflection and imagination. ⁵ Fifty years earlier Maurice Merleau-Ponty outlined his thesis on the corpspropre, in which the body is understood as the vehicle by which individuals comprehend the phenomenal world, the site where objectivity and subjectivity engage each other. The body, for Merleau-Ponty, is above all communicative: it is our medium for “having” a world. ⁶ Both Merleau-Ponty and Kirmayer insist that subjective experience cannot be conceptualized simply as an internalized response to discourse and practices external to the body, but rather participates in its own creation.

These essential tensions between experience and representation and between body and mind are...