ABSTRACT
The position that the body is constructed is one that is surely, if not immediately, associated with Michel Foucault. In separate contexts, Foucault appears paradoxically to criticize both Freud and Nietzsche for assuming a prediscursive ontology of the body and its drives. In effect, the statement, 'the body is constructed', refuses to allow that the indefinite article is itself a construction that calls for a genealogical account. Within a number of texts, Foucault clearly questions whether there is a "materiality" to bodies which is in any sense separable from the ideational or cultural meanings that constitute bodies within specific social fields. Within "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault describes the body through a series of metaphors and figures, yet predominantly as a "surface," a set of multidirectional "forces," and as the scene or site of a cultural inscription. By maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription, Foucault appears to assume a materiality to the body prior to its signification and form.
