ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 establishes the broader framework of embodiment and Wallace’s dissatisfaction with it within which the rest of the book is situated. There has been, and continues to be much fruitful, insightful, and compelling debate about Wallace’s literary examination of the mind-body problem, and this has generally been figured in largely Cartesian terms, within the paradigm of a substance dualism that has, especially during the past half-century, given way to diverse and more distinctively nuanced varieties of dualism. The intention in this chapter is to rebalance the discussion by shifting the weight of the binary mind/body to body/mind, diverting attention from consciousness, solipsism, narcissism, or psychopathology, to the various agentive positions incarnated in the material of the body. For Wallace, I argue, the body is a tripartite system of conflicted intentions constituted by the mechanical body and its capacity to sustain intentions towards its environment; the genetic ‘hard-wired’ body that is the mechanism of genetic proliferation; and the individual subject attempting to exercise something like free will despite, not because of or with the body. Indeed, the key question posed here is whether persons have, or are bodies, or indeed whether they are had by their bodies.
