ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic body is going through changes. Once upon a time, it was real, substantial, finite, mapped by excitable but containable erogenous zones. Recently, however, it seems hardly corporeal or sensate at all. Thanks to Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, what was for Sigmund Freud a biological entity has become, in postmodern thought, a linguistic/cultural coproduction, always unstable and contingent, deeply theorized in literary, feminist, queer, and culture studies. 1 The instability of the psychoanalytic body is most prominent in the feminist critique of gender, where the body’s classic theoretical services, as the raw material of desire and the fount of epistemic certainty, seem no longer to be required. A dilemma ensues: absent biology, what becomes of the body? Postmodern thinking resolves: See it as language, as construction, as process, as representation. How convenient for psychoanalysis, a practice that, trafficking so heavily in the symbolic, can uniquely assess, if not yet remedy, two linked problems central to the postmodern solution: the consignments of the body to the Real and of the self to the Imaginary.
