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The Body of History
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17217 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1990 |
4,454 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Casey
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FRAGMENTS FOR A HISTORY OF THE HUMAN BODY
Ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi
New York: Zone, 1989
Three volumes, approx. 1,800 pp., $19.95 per volume (paper), $37.95 (cloth)
Does the human body have a history? It is odd to think that it does when we assume, as most of us do, that the body - which is to say, my body and your body, anybody's own body - is peculiar to each of us, unique in its physical features and wholly personal in its internal feeling. Indeed, an entire tradition in philosophy has pinned our very personal identity on our bodily being: What first, and perhaps also last, distinguishes me from you is the sheer fact that your body looks different from mine. Whatever common history - we are differentiated from each other precisely as material bodies. "The identity of indiscernibles" (as Leibniz formulated it) is nowhere seen more perspicuously than just here: If I were not discernible from you at the level of ordinary perception, I would be you - you yourself.
Not only at the level of perception (where material particularity is paramount) but in other ways as well, we tend to believe that our bodies are idiosyncratic. A powerful reinforcement of this view has come from psychoanalysis, especially in its Freudian format. Freud stressed the primacy of ontogenesis in the fate of instinctual vicissitudes. If there is a history of the body in Freud's view, it is the history of an individual's own convoluted interactions with parents and other significant figures. While interested in questions of phylogenesis or the evolution of the human species as a whole, Freud's clinical approach and his focus on an individual's given symptoms - "the symptom," he once said, "is on the agenda all the time" - eventuated in an image of the human being as ineluctably self-enclosed in an individuated set of fantasies and memories that bear upon their holder's own body. In the psychoanalytic perspective, the history of the body, if there is such a history to begin with, is always and only my own history.
But what if things are otherwise? What if there is a collective history of the body? This might be a history that belongs to me and to you together - ourselves taken now not in separation from each other but as entities who are parts of a greater whole. This greater whole may itself have differing identities; it could be social or religious in character, or it could consist in a particular but still collective history (e.g., the history of acceptable gestures, or of recommended postures). It need not be continuous to be efficacious; it could be quite fragmentary and yet deeply influence the lives of individual bodies - as occurs strikingly in the case of a tabooed sexual practice such as masturbation.
When we begin to think in this quite different direction about our bodies, we suddenly realize that an entire new world of observation and thought awaits us. It is the merit of Fragments for a History of the Human Body to have anticipated this direction and to have provided numerous and detailed insights into this new world: a new world that includes the ancient world as well. Edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi and recently published by Zone Press, the three volumes of Fragments are attractively printed (and at a remarkably reasonable price considering their handsome presentation). Disclaiming comprehensiveness - hence the
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