The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings

The volume brings together for the first time foundational twentieth–century texts on the concept of the body. The concept of the body has emerged as one of the most important areas of recent philosophical inquiry. Continental thinkers, beginning with the phenomenologists, began to rethink this important concept and to develop alternatives to traditional analytic reductionist attempts to characterize the body in mere physical or biological terms. This volume begins with selections from phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Hidegger, and Maurice Merleau–Ponty. These selections are accompanied by essays from Donn Welton, Elmar Holenstein, David Levin, Anthony J. Steinbock and Drew Leder (Part I). The phenomenological accounts have been supplemented, perhaps replaced, by the psychotropic and genealogical analyses of Jacques Lacan and Michael Foucault (Part II), and by the semiological analysis of the gendered body offered by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray (Part III). The theories of these important yet difficult thinkers are Discussed in seminal essay by Charles Bonner, alphonso Lingis, Judith Butler, Kelly Oliver, and Tina Chanter.

Acknowledgments. Introduction. Foundations of a Theory of Body. Part I. Phenomenological Formulations. Edmund Husserl. 1. Material Things in Their Relation to the Aesthetic Body. The Constitution of Psychic Reality Through the Body. (Edmund Husserl). 2. Soft, Smooth Hands: Husserl′s Phenomenology of the Lived–Body. (Donn Welton). 3. The Zero–Point of Orientation: The Placement of the I in Perceived Space. (Elmar Holenstein). Martin Heidegger. 4. Introduction to Being and Time. Equipment, Action, and the World. Dasein as Affective Responsiveness and as Understanding. Seeing and Sight. Hearing, Discourse and the Call of Care. Hands. On Hearing the Logos. (Martin Heidegger). 5. The Ontological Dimension of Embodiment. Heidegger′s Thinking of Being. (David Michael Levin). Maurice Merleau–Ponty. 6. Situating the Body. The Lived Body. The Body in its Sexual Being. The Natural World and the Body. (Maurice Merleau–Ponty). 7. Saturated Intentionality. (Anthony J. Steinbock). 8. Flesh and Blood. A Proposed Supplement to Merleau–Ponty. (Drew Leder). Part II. Psycho– and Sociotropic Genealogical Analyses. Jacques Lacan. 9. Towards a Genetic Theory of the Ego. The See–saw of Desire. Jacques Lacan. The Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Body. Anamorphosis. (Jacques Lacan). 10. The Status and Significance of the Body in Lacan′s Imaginary and Symbolic Orders. (Charles W. Bonner). Michel Foucault. 11. Discipline and Punish. The History of Sexuality. (Michel Foucault). 12. The Subjectification of the Body. (Alphonso Lingis). 13. Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions. (Judith Butler). Part III. Towards a Semiotics of the Gendered Body. Julia Kristeva. 14. Subject and Body. On the Meaning of Drives. (Julia Kristeva). 15. The Flesh Become Word. The Body in Kristeva′s Theory. Kelly Oliver. Luce Irigaray. 16. Female Desire. (Luce Irigary). 17. Beyond Sex and Gender. On Luce Irigaray′s This Sex Which is Not One. (Tina Chanter)

Donn Welton is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has served as Chair of the Department, and as Co–Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. He has published widely on the phenomenology of Husserl, philosophical psychology, and issues in contemporary continental philosophy. Welton is the editor of Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (Blackwell, 1998); Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy (co–edited with Hugh Silverman, 1988); and Critical Dialectical Phenomenology (co–edited with Hugh Silverman, 1987). He is the author of The Origins of Meaning: A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian Phenomenology (1983).

"Finally, those of us who teach courses on continental theories of the body will be able to say goodbye to homemade readers! This beautifully organized and indispensable anthology puts it all together for us: well–chosen selections from the foundational twentieth–century texts and clarifying contemporary commentary. An invaluable contribution for teachers, students, and scholars." Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, University of Kentucky <!––end––>