Abstract

The body in the various ways it is defined in philosophy and social theory is one of the major subjects of current writing that seeks to question certain practices and omissions in the history of western thought and that takes the body to be a major point of entry into the investigation of these practices and omissions. This study examines experiential theories of the body as an alternative to traditional western metaphysical conceptions of it where, through a Cartesian analysis, it is reduced to a material or ideal object separate from mind, feeling and the social whole. Embodiment and its relation to rationality will subtend the analysis. This interdisciplinary approach will draw from philosophy and social theory; primarily, though not exclusively, from the work of Deleuze, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. ;This study contributes to the role of the body in represention and social/political organization but situates the analysis in the group of theories on the body where the body is not perceived to be reducible to symbolic systems including language, or to a function of biological drives, and neither where it is a simple metaphor for technological production as institutional, discursive, or cultural. Instead the aim is to attempt to draw from the body's own signifying practices and organization. The points of comparison between the methodologies of phenomenology and social theory will centre on embodiment as force relations, spatiality and temporality. This analysis will have existential and ontological implications for the role of the body in rationality, language, and intersubjectivity. ;Finally, this investigation will centre on theories that attempt to remain experiential and non-positional analyses of the body. Experiential is defined here as an understanding of phenomena as inextricably bound to other phenomena which makes appropriate an examination of relations rather than states. Non-positional refers to both an attempt to think the body, and an approach to theory that is not founded in dualism and categories but that also acknowledges the impossibility of completely escaping these structures. The relation of human consciousness to its world through its embodied constitution by, and mediation of, spatiality and temporality is the key area of investigation