Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism by Elizabeth Grosz (review)

Book Reviews85 Instead, there was an increasing, visible barrier between women and radical revolutionary politics. Dena Goodman's book, well presented and extremely well documented, introduces provocative explanations for the failure of the Enlightenment and provides much food for thought. MARIE-FRANCE HILGAR University ofNevada, Las Vegas ELIZABETH GROSZ. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. 276 p. Challenging the "profound somatophobia" (5) of traditional philosophy, Grosz privileges the body as "the very 'stuff' of subjectivity" (ix). She collapses both the mind-body hierarchy and conventional oppositions between nature and culture by arguing that the body is "a cultural, the cultural product" (23). While conceding that biology is not "infinitely pliable" (190), she sets out to rescue the body from the fallacy of pseudonaturalism, claiming that "cultural inscriptions quite literally constitute bodies ... as such" (x), shaping them in tangible and determinate ways. We cannot posit the existence of a precultural body or understand sexual difference as unmediated biological fact since "[t]here is no natural body to return to" outside cultural production (58). Volatile Bodies offers some intricate entanglements with theories of subjectivity drawn from a wide terrain. The first half of this densely written book explores psychological, neurological, and phenomenological perspectives on the "psychical structuring" of the subject's "corporeal exterior"; the second half discusses the body as a surface socially inscribed in ways that "generate a psychical interiority" (115). Many configurations of the mindbody relation are played out as Grosz engages in an interrogative, often antagonistic dialogue with the "fathers" of contemporary thought. She demonstrates that their theories are tacitly predicated on the male body, even when they ostensibly focus on femininity. Thus the body demands to be reclaimed by feminism, partly because it foregrounds the question of sexual difference, and partly because, as the "threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal point of binary pairs" (23), it yields so readily to deconstruction. The paradigm proposed for rethinking body-mind relations is the Möbius strip, a figure in which one surface is twisted into another, inside becoming outside in a process of endless reversibility and transmutation. This figure also mirrors the organization of the text, which broadly shifts from interiority to exteriority, or from psychic depth to corporeal surfaces, but always with a view to collapsing or at least complicating these distinctions. The early chapters trace the body's central significance in psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity. Grosz emphasizes the "radical inseparability of 86Rocky Mountain Review biological from psychical elements" (85); for if the mind can be seen as an "introjection" of the body and its meanings (115), organic processes are in turn deeply susceptible to cultural signification, resulting in "a complete plasticity in the body's compliance with sexual meanings" (54). Femininity is notoriously defined by Freud and Lacan as the state of castration: Grosz takes this notion of the missing part in a new direction when she connects Schilder's work on the phantom limb—a phenomenon observed in almost all removed body parts—with such female disorders as hysteria, hypochondria, and anorexia, the last of which represents "a kind of mourning for a preOedipal (i.e. precastrated) body . . ." (40). Neurological and psychological breakdowns manifest the astonishing complexity of body-mind relations and generate some startling but intriguing speculation: for example, "Do women have a phantom phallus?" (73). The role of perception or "bodyimage " as a mediating agent in the mind-body opposition is further explored in a discussion of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as the source for Irigary's writings on fluidity, femininity, and touch. Grosz gives some compelling readings of philosophers who construct the body as a writing surface open to cultural markings. In her analysis of Foucault, Lingis, and Deleuze and Guattari, she traces the influence of Nietzsche (the body as a "social/political organization" subjected to the "chaos of whirling forces" [123]) and of Kafka (the body inscribed into a "theater of cruelty" [135J). Deleuze's anti-humanism is validated for its emphasis on multiplicity and metamorphosis, on becoming, and specifically on "becoming-woman"; this offers the most promising possibilities for the kinds of radical re-presentations that feminism needs. Grosz ends by...