230625 Discourses around the Western Body: "Is the Body the Prison for the Soul, Reason or Mind?" (S) (SoSe 2009)

As the title announces, this seminar engages with what the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz calls “a most peculiar ‘thing,’ for it is never quite reducible to being merely a thing; nor does it ever quite manage to rise above the status of thing,” that is, the body. What does Grosz mean by this statement? What are the limits/the assets of her assertion? Is the body really a peculiar, indeed, most peculiar object non-object? A thing and a non-thing? If it is, what are the peculiarities of a thing that is not quite a thing but does not seem to be able to arise above the status of a thing? If it is not, what is the body then? Is it fundamentally biological? Is it pure materiality, a prison for the Soul, Reason or Mind? Or is it interiority exteriority? As a matter of fact, can such a vague object non-object matter? Does the body matter? Do bodies matter at all? How do they matter? When, why, to what ends does the body matter, if it matters at all?

This READING INTENSIVE seminar, which will be based on class discussion, engages with these questions (and many others questions around/about the Western body) from a constructivist approach. Required reading are, among others, theoretical texts by Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Janet Price, Friedrich Nietzsche, Londa Schiebinger, Thomas Laqueur, Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc., and literary texts by William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Kate Chopin, Maryse Condé, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Shelley, Cherríe L. Moraga, etc. A reader will be available at the beginning of the course. Most theoretical and literary texts are also available on reserve.