ABSTRACT
Is the body invariant across history and culture, or is it the product of social constitution? With the exception of Nietzsche, canonical modern philosophers since Descartes usually take the first alternative for granted, if they think about the body at all. In contrast, recent French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu make strong cases for taking the second hypothesis more seriously. Foucault and Bourdieu see subjectivity as extensively constructed by social and historical factors that are below the level of consciousness and thus less transparent to phenomenological introspection. They show to an even greater extent than their phenomenological precursor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that much of our comportment is already built into our bodies in ways that we do not and perhaps cannot attend to explicitly.
