PHL3020

Rethinking bodies

Elizabeth Grosz

8 points
* 2- 3 hours per week
* First semester
* Clayton

Objectives To provide an understanding of the prevailing philosophical and cultural understanding of the relations between mind and body which have privileged the former at the expense of the latter; to demonstrate that an alternative history can be outlined using relatively marginal figures in the history of Western thought (Nietzche, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray etc.); to provide the reading and conceptual skills necessary to understand these texts and to move beyond them to devise students' own critical positions regarding these texts; and to provide critical and expressive resources necessary to write clear, concise, accurate and independent essays on topics related to this reading.

Synopsis This subject offers an introduction to various theoretical accounts of the body. The body has generally been relegated to a secondary or subordinate position relative to the mind or reason throughout the history of Western thought. We will examine how the humanities rely on unacknowledged accounts of the body to develop concepts of the mind. The subject will be divided into four parts. The introduction will present a selective survey of the ways in which the body and the mind have been formulated in modern Western thought. In the second part, we will discuss some relatively rare accounts which do discuss the lived experience of the body, notably those provided by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the third part, we will examine the body in a socio-political context, as a surface of cultural inscription. And in the fourth and final part, we will look at the implications of acknowledging the corporeal differences between the sexes for notions of knowledge and representation.

Assessment Written (6000 words): 100%

Recommended texts

Deleuze G and Guattari F A thousand plateaus Athlone Press
Douglas M Purity and danger Penguin
Foucault M Power/knowledge Harvester
Foucault M Discipline and punish Penguin
Foucault M The history of sexuality vol. 1, Random House
Irigaray L This sex which is not one Cornell U P
Kafka F Metamorphosis and other short stories Penguin
Kristeva J Powers of horror Columbia U P
Lacan J Ecrits: A selection Tavistock
Lingis A Excesses: Eros and culture SUNY Press
Lingis A Libido: The French existential theories Indiana U P
Merleau-Ponty M The primacy of perception Northwestern U P
Nietzsche F The genealogy of morals Vintage Books
O'Neill J Five bodies Cornell U P
Turner B S The body and society: Explorations in social theory Blackwell