Foreign Bodies

by Lingis,Alphonso

• ISBN13: 9780415909907
• ISBN10: 0415909902
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1994-08-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Foreign Bodiesanalyzes how our culture elaborates for us the bodies we have by natural evolution. Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us.

Table of Contents

Preface
The Force of the Body
The Competent Body	p. 3
Orchids and Muscles	p. 29
Bodies Our Own	p. 47
The Pleasure and the Pain
The Subjectification of the Body	p. 53
The Insistence on Correspondence	p. 77
These Alien Feelings That Are Our Own	p. 99
The Libidinal Economy
Hard Currency	p. 107
Fluid Economy	p. 133
Strange Lusts That Are Our Own	p. 161
Imperative Bodies
Imperative Surfaces	p. 167
Elemental Bodies	p. 189
Foreign Bodies	p. 215
Notes	p. 227
Index	p. 237
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