Corporeal Passions: Experiments in Visceral Writing

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings.
(Albert Camus, 1956: 36)

 

The Unknown Life of the Body
In Western tradition, the body has been considered an obstacle not only to intelligence but also to action. It is quite puzzling to think of the body not being relegated to meanings and representations. Paradoxically, if the body has a magical plenitude for active forces, it is also a passive agent waiting to be inscribed by particular logos. In the realm of social sciences a certain metaphysics setting dualisms between body and mind, subject and object, nature and culture, as well as presence and significance has been at work. The life of the body still remains unconscious and un-theorized. Gilles Deleuze, writing on Spinoza and Nietzsche, diagrams a philosophical reversal by posing a paralelism between body and thought.

... the body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:189)
 

 


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