Reviewed by Debra B. Bergoffen
George Mason University

Perspectives on Embodiment is a model of multi/interdisciplinary philosophical inquiry. In their selection and arrangement of essays, the editors (both philosophers) demonstrate their commitment to attend to the data of the human and cognitive sciences, to break down the analytic-continental divide that plagues the philosophical field, and to show the ways in which philosophical theory provides the sciences with crucial interpretative tools. The essays in the volume reveal the junctures of philosophy, anthropology, political theory, history, women’s studies, religious studies, psychology, and artificial intelligence research. In their introduction, the editors say that their goal is to promote new perspectives on embodiment and new ways of thinking about the body. They succeed, not only in this, but also (as the subtitle suggests) in providing fresh ways of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture. In critiquing traditional ways of thinking about the body, the essays interrupt the familiar themes of the nature-culture debates to establish that whether we think of the body as naturally given and therefore immune to the powers of discourse, or as historically constructed and therefore free from the constraints of biology but subjected to the forces of culture, so long as we think of ourselves as having bodies rather than as embodied, we undermine the possibilities of human agency. Committed in this way to the concept of embodiment, this volume is also an affirmation of human historical and moral agency.

The essays in Part I, "Identifying Bodies and Bodily Identifications," endorse the idea of the body as historically constructed. In attending to the habituated body (David Couzens Hoy), the imaged body (Gail Weiss), the racial disappearing body (Tracy Fessenden), and the narrated body ( Sean P. O’Connell), these essays reject the claim that the forces that constitute us as embodied subjects render us passive. Hoy, drawing on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, argues that identifying the ways in which we are conditioned is itself a form of resistance to this conditioning. He shows that resistance need not be grounded in appeals to universal or a priori principles to be effective. Weiss, appealing to the work of Lacan, Kristeva, Butler, and Grosz, contests traditional accounts of the anorexic body. On her account the difference between the anorexic and others subjected to idealized images of the thin female body is that the anorexic, captivated/captured by this single body image, has lost the capacity for resistance that healthy multi-imaged embodied subjects possess. O’Connell, taking up the analyses of Ricoeur, Butler, Lacan, and Heidegger, and exploring the concept of the gift, speaks of our identities as narrative responses to the possibilities given us by our social/cultural situations. Insisting that self identity is a matter of continuity, not sameness, he tells us that in responding to the identity given to us we can, through self testimony, refashion ourselves. Taken together, these essays ask us to rethink the concept of agency. Instead of defining agency as a matter of conscious, rational, deliberate action, we are asked to understand it as a matter of the body—that is, as work done at the preconscious and unconscious levels. More precisely, this rethinking requires that we understand the difference between the human being that has a body and the embodied human being, and that we see that as embodied we are endowed with bodily intentionalities.

Developing this understanding is the project of Part II, "Embodied Mind: Phenomenological Approaches to Cognitive Science, Psychology and Anthropology." Here the pervasive philosophical influence is Merleau-Ponty, whose work is used to establish the distinction between the body and embodiment and to develop the idea of the intertwining. Mark Johnson opens this section telling us that the concept of embodiment is crucial to second generation cognitive science. These cognitive scientists understand reason as grounded in the structures of the brain and body and as developed in interactions with the environment and others. Applauding this insight, Johnson argues that it will only be fully articulated if we abandon the traditional idea of the body for the phenomenological notion of embodiment. Thomas Csordas shows us what is at stake in this distinction when he defines embodiment as the experience of being in the world and when, using the examples of cross cultural healing practices, he reveals the unstable and culturally variable relationship between culture and the body. John Sanders’ idea of affordance is a helpful way of understanding this relationship. Describing affordance as the opportunity for action in the natural and cultural worlds, Sanders tells us that these worlds are made through engaged agency with affordances. Where Sanders refers our worldmaking to the idea of affordances, Herbert and Stuart Dreyfus refer us to Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of intentional arc and maximum grip. In explicating these concepts, they show how they are paradigmatic models of the ways in which we as embodied open up a world.

These essays show us that the shift from understanding our materiality as an embodiment rather than as a body entails a another shift. It is possible to speak of the body as reacting to its environment. It is inappropriate to speak this way of embodiment. As embodied, we respond to our surroundings. As responsive, we actively engage a world. The behaviorist stimulus/response model of action can never account for the reality of lived embodied activity. Taking up the issues raised in the first part of the anthology, these essays supplement and extend Merleau-Ponty’s ideas. They remind us that the difference between the body and embodiment is not to be confused with the difference between nature and culture. The embodied subject is not the product of culture molding a static or preprogrammed natural body. Mark Johnson’s essay is especially helpful here. His discussion of infant research directs us to the intertwining of nature and culture and to the ways in which appeals to the nature/culture divide produce false dichotomies that betray our sense of self and repudiate our capacities for worldmaking.

Part III, "Rewriting The History of the Body," returns us to the theories of Foucault and Lacan. Its focus on the historicity of embodiment, rather than on the perceptual grounds of embodiment, is perhaps best captured in the title of Charles Shepherdson’s essay, "The Epoch of the Body." Coming from the discussions of Part II, we are now prepared to read the term ‘body’ cautiously. Our caution is repaid as Shepherdson argues that Lacan’s concept of the drive functions as a supplement and corrective to Kojve’s understanding of desire and intersubjectivity by directing us away from the idea of a natural body and alerting us to the error of the nature/culture divide. Martin Jay’s opening essay sets the tone of this section by speaking of the ways in which the strategy of privileging sight has erased the reality of our embodiment and allowed us to forget the ways in which sight as a bodily sense is embedded in the body’s spatial and temporal rhythms. Kevin O’Neill shows that this erasure concerns more than a single sense and that it may be motivated by the anxiety/fear of death as reflected in funeral practices that aestheticize the dead body and alienate us from the body’s vulnerabilities. The volume closes, however, on a somewhat optimistic note. Bringing the concepts of embodiment and agency together under the sign of death, Thomas Tierney argues that current issues raised by the right to die movement reflect the tensions between the social contract idea of the body as my property and the natural law/Enlightenment obligation to preserve life. Bringing these tensions to light, Tierney tells us, marks the end of the era of the body. He sees our current attention to the concept of embodiment as symptomatic of our historical/technological condition. It speaks to the fact that we are driven to reconsider the concepts which have led us to endure the prospect of prolonging the life of a body which can no longer live as embodied, and speaks of our desire to move in other directions.