(Un)wanted Feelings in Anorexia Nervosa: Making the Visceral Body Mine Again

In my article "Controlling the noise," I present a phenomenological investigation of bodily experience in anorexia nervosa (AN). Turning to descriptions of those who have suffered from AN, which repeatedly detail the experience of finding their bodies threatening, out of control and noisy, I suggest that the phenomenological conceptions of body-as-object, body-as-subject and visceral body can help us unpack the complex bodily experience of AN throughout its various stages. My claim is that self-starvation is enacted by a bodily-subject who wishes to quell or reassert authority over a visceral body whose demands and needs she finds threatening to her autonomy.

The relationship between body-as-object and body-as-subject, while well-established in phenomenology, is a complex one. While the body-as-object is intended to pick out the body as a material object and the body-as-subject is intended to pick out how we as embodied subjects engage with the world through our bodies, these cannot be teased apart into a neat binary. For me to experience my body as an object, I must be the bodily subject experiencing my body-as-object; likewise, my experience as a body-as-subject is always shaped by the structure of my physical body in terms of how I can act in the world and what possibilities I experience the world as having for me.

As both Maiese and Leder note in their generous and insightful commentaries, things are no less complex when it comes to the visceral body. Here, I explore how the suggestions posed by both commentators can further enrich our understanding of the visceral body and how it is experienced in AN. Leder (1990) coined the term visceral body to refer to the inner workings of the body. That we are visceral bodies highlights why we should not mistake descriptions of the body-as-object as an inert physical thing, but a living thing in the world. It is the visceral body that gives rise to feelings such as hunger and tiredness. In his commentary, Leder draws attention to the fact that living with the physical needs and constraints of our bodies is the "lot" of being human. We are not pure, unfettered subjectivity but a subjectivity rooted in the flesh of the body.

Perhaps what is most perplexing about the visceral body is that while I, typically, experience my body's hunger as my own hunger, I can experience the feelings of the visceral body as unwanted, as pressing in on me from elsewhere, as in conflict with my projects, desires, even with (aspects of) my self. I can feel betrayed by the workings of my own body, let down by it, for instance, when I wake wanting to get on with a busy day and find myself tired and sluggish. And yet, as Maiese highlights, the visceral body is part of being an embodied subject and need not always be experienced in the foreground of our experience, nor as necessarily in tension with the body-as subject. Indeed, Maiese rightly notes that the visceral body can shape the experience of the body-as-subject, without being experienced as a troublesome part of the body-as-object: "When I am hungry, I may perceive the stack of papers I have to grade as even more daunting. When I am stressed, I may perceive someone's comment as particularly insensitive. This means that in many instances, the visceral body is not in tension with, but rather part of, the body-as-subject." This adds a refinement to my own descriptions of the visceral body, highlighting that the visceral body may shape the body-as-subject's being in the world without creating the kind of conflict that we find in AN.

This insight should not surprise us. Although Leder (1990) talks of how the body-as-object becomes absent when we smoothly engage with the world as body-as-subject, we should be careful not to conceive of the physical body as disappearing altogether. Being a body-as-subject does not mean...