The Body

From Immanuel Kant to Postmodernism, this volume provides an unparalleled student resource: a wide-ranging collection of the essential works of more than 50 seminal thinkers in modern European philosophy.

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Foundations of a Theory of the Body 1

Part I Phenomenological Formulations 9

Edmund Husserl 11

1 Material Things in Their Relation to the Aesthetic Body 11

The Constitution of Psychic Reality Through the Body 23

Edmund Husserl

2 Soft, Smooth Hands: Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Lived-Body 38

Donn Welton

3 The Zero-Point of Orientation: The Placement of the I in Perceived Space 57

Elmar Holenstein

Martin Heidegger 95

4 Introduction to Being and Time 95

Equipment, Action, and the World 97

Dasein as Affective Responsiveness and as Understanding 103

Seeing and Sight 103

Hearing, Discourse, and the Call of Care 110

Hands 111

On Hearing the Logos 115

Martin Heidegger

5 The Ontological Dimension of Embodiment: Heidegger’s Thinking of Being 122

David Michael Levin

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 150

6 Situating the Body 150

The Lived Body 154

The Body in Its Sexual Being 158

The Natural World and the Body 166

Maurice Merleau–Ponty

7 Saturated Intentionality 178

Anthony J. Steinbock

8 Flesh and Blood: A Proposed Supplement to Merleau–Ponty 200

Drew Leder

Part II Psycho- and Sociotropic Genealogical Analyses 211

Jacques Lacan 213

9 Towards a Genetic Theory of the Ego 213

The See-saw of Desire 218

The Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Body 221

Anamorphosis 223

Jacques Lacan

10 The Status and Significance of the Body in Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic Orders 232

Charles W Bonner

Michel Foucault: 252

11 Discipline and Punish 252

The History of Sexuality 269

Michel Foucalt

12 The Subjectification of the Body 286

Alphonso Lingis

13 Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions 307

Judith Butler

Part III Towards a Semiotics of the Gendered Body 315

Julia Kristeva 317

14 Subject and Body 317

On the Meaning of Drives 325

Julia Kristeva

15 The Flesh Become Word: The Body in Kristeva’s Theory 341

Kelly Oliver

Luce Irigaray 353

16 Female Desire 353

Luce Irigaray

17 Beyond Sex and Gender: On Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One 361

Tina Chanter

"Finally, those of us who teach courses on continental theories of the body will be able to say goodbye to homemade readers! This beautifully organized and indispensable anthology puts it all together for us: well-chosen selections from the foundational twentieth-century texts and clarifying contemporary commentary. An invaluable contribution for teachers, students, and scholars." Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, University of Kentucky Donn Welton is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has served as Chair of the Department, and as Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. He has published widely on the phenomenology of Husserl, philosophical psychology, and issues in contemporary continental philosophy. Welton is the editor of Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (Blackwell, 1998); Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy (co-edited with Hugh Silverman, 1988); and Critical Dialectical Phenomenology (co-edited with Hugh Silverman, 1987). He is the author of The Origins of Meaning: A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian Phenomenology (1983). The volume brings together for the first time foundational twentieth-century texts on the concept of the body.

The concept of the body has emerged as one of the most important areas of recent philosophical inquiry. Continental thinkers, beginning with the phenomenologists, began to rethink this important concept and to develop alternatives to traditional analytic reductionist attempts to characterize the body in mere physical or biological terms.

This volume begins with selections from phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Hidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These selections are accompanied by essays from Donn Welton, Elmar Holenstein, David Levin, Anthony J. Steinbock and Drew Leder (Part I). The phenomenological accounts have been supplemented, perhaps replaced, by the psychotropic and genealogical analyses of Jacques Lacan and Michael Foucault (Part II), and by the semiological analysis of the gendered body offered by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray (Part III). The theories of these important yet difficult thinkers are
Discussed in seminal essay by Charles Bonner, alphonso Lingis, Judith Butler, Kelly Oliver, and Tina Chanter.