The Body: The Possibility of Another View

Abstract

In a commonly held view, which is supported by the majority of multi-directional scientific research, the body is understood in purely descriptive terms or is considered in relation to corporeality, culture, cultural practices. Humanities provide a broad understanding of the history of the body, its representation in different cultural periods, focusing on parts of the body and describing it in terms of art, literature, cinema, biopolitics, fashion, etc. This perspective is not necessarily incorrect, however, it is incomplete. It is quite enough to mention Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Roland Barthes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, or Catherine Malabou to demonstrate the complexity of the issue of a body. The body is presented through different perspectives and according to different researchers’ methodological preferences, but all of these need to be integrated into a system. The system has its own inviolable borders and is habituated to them. The body, as a system, iterates itself and reacts to threats and stimuli in a painful and aggressive way, seeking to protect itself and to secure its survival. This is fully consistent with the normative behaviour, yet it does not reflect genuineness (whatever that may imply), and the inflexibility of this viewpoint is somewhat repressive.More extensive research of the body that incorporates deconstruction (which is not a method, a critic, or an analysis) opens new research horizons and allows for the idea that the body does not necessarily correspond to corporeality, nature, and cultural practices. Rather, there are sufficient grounds to think of the body (at least at the theoretical level) as something individual. In other words, the body emerges in view of the corporeality, as well as omits it, thereby bypassing discourse and the language. The separation of the body reveals itself as accessible due to reviews of certain positions in terms of deconstruction that open paths for the body “as such” in isolation from correlations. The body “as such” resides in the language game and, in doing so, separates itself from corporeality and becomes deconceptualized.