Thinking the Limits of the Body

Description

This collection maps the very best efforts to think the body at its limits. Because the body encompasses communities (social and political bodies), territories (geographical bodies), and historical texts and ideas (a body of literature, a body of work), Cohen and Weiss seek trans-disciplinary points of resonance and divergence to examine how disciplinary metaphors materialize specific bodies, and where these bodies break down and/or refuse prescribed paths. Whereas postmodern theorizations of the body often neglect its corporeality in favor of its cultural construction, this book demonstrates the inseparability of textuality, materiality, and history in any discussion of the body.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Bodies at the Limit
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss

PART I: HORIZONS

1. Histories of the Present and Future: Feminism, Power, Bodies
Elizabeth Grosz

2. The Body as a Narrative Horizon
Gail Weiss

PART II: DERMAL BOUNDARIES

3. Cutups in Beauty School
Linda S. Kauffman

4. Deep Skin
William A. Cohen

PART III: RACIAL EDGES

5. Ontological Crisis and Double Narration in African American Fiction: Reconstructing Our Nig
Laura Doyle

6. Parallaxes: Cannibalism and Self-Embodiment; or, The Calvinist Reading of Tupi A-Theology
Sara Castro-Klar´en

PART IV: DIS-ABLING ALLIANCES

7. Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

8. Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies
Robert McRuer

PART V: LIMINALITIES

9. The Inhuman Circuit
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

10. Mourning the Autonomous Body
Debra B. Bergoffen

About the Contributors

Index

Sujets

• English articles
• The
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791487471
• Langue: English

Extrait

Thinking the Limits of the Body

SUNY Series in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Mary C. Rawlinson, editor

Thinking the Limits of the Body

edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss

State University of New York Press

Material from chapter 3 originally appeared in Linda Kauffman,Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture, 1998 Regents of the University of California

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

 2003 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production by Dana Foote Marketing by Patrick Durocher

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Thinking the limits of the body / edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss. p. cm. — (SUNY series in aesthetics and the philosophy of art) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0791455998 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0791456005 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Body, Human—Social aspects. 2. Body, Human (Philosophy) I. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. II. Weiss, Gail, 1959– III. Series.

HM636 .T55 2003 306.4—dc21

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2002036684

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N

1

9

Ontological Crisis and Double Narration in African American Fiction: ReconstructingOur Nig Laura Doyle Parallaxes: Cannibalism and SelfEmbodiment; or, The Calvinist Reading of Tupi ATheology Sara CastroKlarén

101

P ART  I HORIZON

S

1.

ON

T

C

P ART  II DERMAL BOUNDARIES

5.

P ART  III RACIAL EDGES

3.

Cutups in Beauty School Linda S. Kauffman Deep Skin William A. Cohen

Histories of the Present and Future: Feminism, Power, Bodies Elizabeth Grosz The Body as a Narrative Horizon Gail Weiss

6.

3

1

4.

2.

Introduction: Bodies at the Limit Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss

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S

vii

Acknowledgments

8

6

3

2

5

3

5

8.

Contents

129

P ART  IV DISABLING ALLIANCES

187

167

145

v

i

7.

Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana Rosemarie GarlandThomson Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/ Disability Studies Robert McRuer

The Inhuman Circuit Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Mourning the Autonomous Body Debra B. Bergoffen

About the Contributors Index

10.

197 199

P ART  V LIMINALITIES

9.

AC

KN

OW

L

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This volume would not have been possible without the generous funding pro vided by the Consortium of Washington Universities. The themes examined here originated in an interdisciplinary faculty research seminar on the body that has been meeting since 1994. We would like to thank all of the past and present members of the seminar for creating the collegial, stimulating environment that led to this volume. We are grateful to Mary Rawlinson, editor of the SUNY series in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, for her support and to Jane Bunker, Dana Foote, and the SUNY Press staff for seeingThinking the Limits of the Body to completion. Our thanks also go to the English Department at The George Washington University for their financial assistance and to Valerie Hazel for producing the index. Finally, we want to state our appreciation to the Human Sciences graduate program at The George Washington University. This inter disciplinary program in language, culture, and society has fostered an intellectual community of graduate students and faculty that is all too rare in the academy today.

Introduction Bodies at the Limit

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss

Poked, probed, sliced, prosthetically enhanced and surgically diminished, trans planted, and artifically stimulated, the body in contemporary culture is the volatile subject of both textual and material fascination. The explosion of tech nologies and methodologies that claim to give us better access to “the truth” of the body have made the body more visible and yet more elusive. Intricate map pings of human genes have reduced the body to a series of secret codes to which our geneticists alone hold the keys. Performance artists use their bodies to chal lenge our understanding of corporeal signification. As a signifying power that does not refer back to a simple origin, the body revealed in the work of Orlan, Annie Sprinkle, Bob Flanagan, Cindy Sherman, and other “flesh artists” belies the stability of conventional formulations of subjectivity. Critical race theorists, queer theorists, and disability theorists have shown us that the body is as prob lematic when it is marked (e.g., by its race, sex, class, ethnicity, age, abilities, etc.) as when it is un(re)marked and viewed as natural or universal. Clearly, the body is well on its way to becoming the interdisciplinary subject of study par excel lence. But what are its limits as concept and category? “The body.” The term suggests a bounded and autonomous entity, univer sal but at the same time singular, atemporal, and therefore unmarked by history. To think the limits of the body is to interrogate this abstract, strangely de materialized vision, appealing as it may be in its Cartesian simplicity. If we take the notion of limit seriously, we must ask to what extent our continual invocation of “the body” limits our very attempts to think beyond its pregiven ontology, its supposed unity. Just as Martin Heidegger maintains inBeing and Timethat every attempt to question Being already presupposes a certain understanding of Being, when we inquire into what “the body” means, we must recognize that both the question and any possible answers to it always unfold against historically con 1 tingent, yet nonetheless powerfully enduring frames of interpretation. More over, if, as Heidegger argues in “What Is Metaphysics?,” “every metaphysical question always encompasses the whole range of metaphysical problems,” then to ask about the status of “the body” is also to examine all those other aspects of existence to which the body is intrinsically related (Heidegger 1993: 93). These include language, perception, agency, culture, textuality, desire, and intersubjec tivity. Any investigation of the body in relationship to these intertwined phenom ena is further complicated by Heidegger’s second point, namely, that “every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, is placed in question” (Heidegger 1993: 93). Here, Heidegger suggests that we cannot interrogate the body without

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