ABSTRACT
For over a decade now, perhaps since the wide reception of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), literary and cultural studies have given a prominent place in their discourse to the figure of the body. Originally, as in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), the body figured as the site on which ideological and repressive state apparatuses – the Church, the School, the Family, the Clinic, the Prison, and so forth – played out their institutional forms of power and control. More recently, the body has figured as the site of aesthesis – of sense, feeling, emotion, sensibility, taste, etc. – that rejected undue emphasis on rationality, certainty, mind, etc. That is, critical aesthetic discourse used the body, its senses, emotions, feelings, pains, affects, neuroses, and so on, to critique scientific notions of rationality. But this was a critical strategy, not meant to reify a mind/body problem that critical theory had long ago rejected in its Cartesian formulations. We do not see that Amariglio and Ruccio’s deployment of the term ‘body’ connects significantly with either of these usages, and wonder whether their main points might not more clearly be expressed in terms of the concept of a person.
