ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which the social inscriptions of the surface of the body generate a psychical interiority—the movement from the outside in. It examines a broad movement in the history of philosophy, beginning with Nietzsche, which has interrogated the primacy of consciousness or experience in conceptions of subjectivity and displaced the privilege of these terms by focusing on the body as a sociocultural artifact rather than as a manifestation or externalization of what is private, psychological, and “deep” in the individual. The chapter examines a number of philosophical positions on the body, from Nietzsche to Foucault, Deleuze, and Lingis, which outline the procedures and powers which carve, mark, incise—that is, actively produce—the body as historically specific, concrete, and determinate. It explores the body’s role in the production of knowledge and truth on one hand and its relations to the will to power on the other.
