1.6 - Lewin, David M. - The Body Politic. the Embodiment of Praxis in Foucault and Habermas (en)

7/30/2019 1.6 - Lewin, David M. - The Body Politic. the Embodiment of Praxis in Foucault and Habermas (en)

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The Body Politic: The Embodiment of Praxis in Foucault and Habermas

The Body Politic: The Embodiment of Praxis in Foucault and Habermas

by David M. Levin

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 1+2 / 1989, pages: 112-132, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=1a2cd39c-1a20-48e9-a565-08c4dc602096http://www.ceeol.com/


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THE BODY POLITIC:THE EMBODIMENT OF PRAXISIN FOUCAULT AND HABERMAS1

David Michael Levin

Questions

As a way of understanding the workings of power, Foucault proposed that wethink about practices of the self, and study the body as object and instrument ofpower. But the body which figures in his work is without subjectivity, withoutany experienceof power: it cannotembody a practical subject. If the body is onlyan object produced by historical forces, how can it be a source of resistance? Howcan it embody praxis? Is there some understanding of the body which Foucaultmisses an understanding by which the subject ispractically empowered? Habermasasserts that philosophical discourse must finally acknowledge an embodiedreason,but he tells us nothing about it. What does this embodiment mean? Habermas also

argues that we must end the rule of a subject-centered reason and put in its placea rationality that is intersubjective and grounded in communicative practices. Howmight an understanding of the embodiment of reason contribute to this project?Many philosophers are wont, even today, to refer us to a sense of justice. Butwhat does this reference mean? And how does it or might it figure in consensus-forming procedures? Do we properly understand the nature of the body thisbody which suddenly makes its appearance in so much of our contemporarydiscourse?

1. Foucault

In Power/Knowledge, Foucault asks: What mode of investment of the bodyis necessary and adequate for the functioning of a capitalistic society like ours?2

And he argues the position that One needs to study what kind of body thecurrent society needs,3 noting that, while there are some very interestingthings about the body in Marxs writings, Marxism considered as an historicalreality has had a terrible tendency to occlude the question of the body, in favourof consciousness and ideology.4 Let us ask, he says, how things work atthe level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninter-rupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our

behaviors. . .5Foucaults question is important. So I agree that political theory must give more

thought to the social body, the body of the body politic. But I want, here, totouch on some of the problems which inhere in his attempts to introduce the bodyinto the discourse of political theory. And I want to argue that his project is


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Praxis International 113

self-defeating that it literally defeats the self unless we follow up hisempirical/descriptive question, about what kind of body our current society needs,with a normative/interpretive question about what kind of society our bodies want,need and dream.

However, before we can take up this second question, we shall need to movetowards an understanding of the body which receives from Foucault not a traceof recognition. As we shall see, there are some tensions and contradictions in hisdiscourse on the body, and these difficulties turn out to parallel, and in fact arecorrelative to, the tensions and contradictions that cause trouble for his conceptionof the practical subject. If we spell out the logic implicit in this conception, wefind that it depends on an argument of four propositions: (i) All social interactions,all communicative relations, are reducible to relations of power, i.e., relationsinvolving domination, (ii) The subject is not inherently intersubjective, notalready oriented, from the very beginning, by any inherent sociability, (iii)Therefore, the subject must be made into a social being, and (iv) The subjectcan become social only through processes of socialization which are inherentlyimpositional and oppressive. This argument has some counter-revolutionaryimplications, much like the implications of Freuds position in Civilization andIts Discontents, according to which the work of civilization can onlybe repressive.For Foucault, the subject is formed by processes of subjection: self-formationis subjectification, and subjectification is objectification, the producing of subjectsas objects and instruments of power. In effect, Foucaults conception of subjectivity

essentializes oppression, building it into the formation and therefore the very needs,of the subject. Moreover, Foucaults conception cuts us off from an orientationtowards intersubjectivity by reference to which we might be able to take the measureof our practices and institutions, and resist their oppressiveness. The rationalityof a just society depends on structures of mutual recognition and reciprocity. Butthe subject which figures in Foucaults discourse has not yet entirely twistedfree of the Cartesian metaphysics: denied, as it is, an inherent (experience of)intersubjectivity, this subject cannot rely on the sociability, the interactionalnature, of its own needs and predispositions to make a critical distinction betweenreason and domination in the processes of society. Thus, for example, although

capitalism has failed, to some extent, to create and protect structures of mutualrecognition and reciprocity, there is a critique of civil society and the state, andconsequently a certain resistance, which the subject, as Foucault conceives it,cannot initiate. If the intersubjectivity of the subject is an order which callsfor, and orders, a society in which there are institutionally guaranteed structuresof mutual recognition and reciprocity that respect (the needs of) this intersubjec-tivity and enable it to develop further, then a critique of the capitalist organizationof state and civil society, based on principles of communicative rationality, willneed to ground its appeal to such principles in the intersubjective nature of thesubject.

Now, when we examine how Foucault conceptualizes the nature of the body,it will not be at all surprising that he never asked the second question: What kindof society do our bodies want, need, and dream? Our reading of the texts willshow that Foucaults thinking moves between two extremes, both of them, in thefinal analysis, untenable: one is a version of historicism; the other is a version

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Praxis International114

of biologism. Despite their extremity, however, each of these conceptions provedto be illuminating: as Foucault deployed them, there can be no doubt that theybrought to light, for political theory, matters which had not been seen before: eventsand processes, practices and institutions, stories and documents. Ultimately,however, it must be understood that these conceptions are not only false; theycan also, in fact, be self-defeating, since, in different ways, they each make itimpossible to embody a praxis that is both critical and emancipatory.

The body according to historicism. According to Foucaults version of historicism,the only order in the human body is an order totally imposed by society, an orderwhich is nothing but the accumulated historical effect of political controls. Foucaultsays: What I want to show is how power relations can materially penetrate thebody in depth....6 Despite the phrase in depth, he tends to think of thebody as nothing but a surface an inscribed surface of events, as he sayselsewhere. And he therefore assigns to his genealogy the task of exposinga body totally imprinted by history and historys destruction of the body.7

According to this conception, the body is merely a surface for the inscription ofsocial order, a material substratum for the application and imposition of power,the power in socially controlled meaning. The body is totally conditioned by itshistorical situation: there is no transhistorical, biologicallygivennature interactingwith history; no nature to limit, resist, channel and mediate historical forces.

This conception of the body, which posits its materiality and objectivity, certainlyenabled Foucault to study the actions and effects of history: how domination and

oppression actually work; how, in the most minute ways, our bodies are continuallybeing formed, produced, reproduced and controlled by the forces of history. Butthis conception does not permit him to articulate any praxis ofresistanceto thesehistorical processes, nor does it even permit him to speak of these processes asprocesses of subjugation, since this is a normative interpretation which mustimplicitly assume that the body is a source of values notcompletely conditionedby history. As Charles Taylor has noted, for Foucault, there is no order of humanlife, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judgeor evaluate between ways of life. There are only different orders imposed by menon primal chaos, following their will-to-power.8

This conception of the body makes it impossible for us to empower the bodywith any capacity to talk backto history, drawing not only on its pain and suffering,but also on its depth of needs, desires, and utopian dreams, to call for an end tothe history of domination and alienation. How could a body, its nature conceivedin this way, ever talk back as womens bodies, for example, obviously have?How could our bodies ever become sources of situationally appropriate forms ofresistance to oppressive regimes of power? If the human body were nothing more,nothing other, than what Foucaults historicism says it is, there would be notouchstone for resistance, no normative ground in the body of our experience fora political response to historical processes destructive to the nature of the body.

In the final analysis, Foucault leaves us with no way to conceptualize a critical-emancipatory praxis comingfromthe experience of the oppressed body. The bodythat is unjustly punished, tortured, violated, brutalized, overworked and left tohunger, the body subjectto oppressive power, can never become a subject capableofresistingit. This does the body an injustice, prepetuating the age-old repressions


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under which the body has suffered; and it defeats our attempts at theorizingemancipatory praxis. In Foucault, the body is important only because it is victimised;but its sufferings can never be a source of practical wisdom, a source of specificguidance, informing us about what needs to be changed, what needs to be done.

To be sure, we must sharpen our alertness to the internalisation of socially imposedmeanings, and we must understand that, as Marx observed, Nature as it comesinto being in human history in the act of creation of human society, is the truenature of man.9 The body is always in history; biologism, the theory thatbiology totally determines our being, is false and self-defeating. But it does notfollow from this that our bodily nature is totally determined by its social historysuch historicism is also false and self-defeating. Our nature, though certainly nottotally predetermined biologically, and not a self-contained, rigidlyfixedstructureor system, is nevertheless to a large extent an unchosen and uncontrollable facticity,a limiting condition given to history. We will never encounter this biologicalgivenness outside of or apart from history; we can never get to know this natureas it is in itself, an und fr sich.10 But we do at least know, from the fact of itsacts of resistance, and its alterity, that the body can no more be totally reducedto social determination, social engineering, than it can be totally reduced to itsbiology. The questions we must then confront are: what is our experience of thebodys given nature, and how should this givenness be received, be taken up, bythe society into which it is cast? Will the nature of our bodies, such as it is, beallowed to speak? Will our bodies be allowed to say what kind of society they

want and hope for? And what, in that case, would our bodies want?For Foucault, there is no deep body. However, the concepts of a deep self,and of a body of depths, cannot be properly evaluated with regard to their critical,emanicipatory, and redemptive potential without considering their discursivecontexts and how they are functioning within those contexts. Apart from contextand function, these concepts are ambiguous, and their political implicationsundecidable. Apart from context and function, we cannot tell whether the deepself and the body of depths are concepts which refer to something authenticor whether, instead, they refer to something false the constructs and projectionsof an oppressive ideology.

Foucaults anti-essentialism goes too far. There is a reactionary danger, as Marxunderstood, in the unqualified denial of the bodys transhistorical dimensionality:when the nature of the body is reduced to history, it has no escape from oppres-sion. Conceptualizing the self and the body as deep may indeed be a way ofcapturing them for social domination: creating a depth of which the individualis unconscious and then filling it with a content (of meanings, motives, reasons,intentions, beliefs) that conforms to the dominant ideology and is taken, therefore,to confirm it. (Psychoanalytic explanations often function this way, reducing politicalpolicy questions, e.g., womans needs, to matters of individual psychology ). 11

But conceptualizing the self and the body as deep may also be a way of

recognizing an irreducible individuality and protecting self and body from socialdomination and totalisation. If, as Freud claimed, the ego is formed at, and as,the surface of the libidinal body,12 and if this ego is a product of socialisation,i.e., of social interaction, then conceptualising the body and the self as deepis one way of denying their reduction to a socially imposed, socially imprinted


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surface; it is one way of representing their withdrawal from, and their resistanceto, a surface-being that is totally determined by the prevailing social prescriptions.Freedom must not be reduced to adaptation. Let us not forget that the human faceis not a surface, but rather a depth, a dimensionality, the presence of anunrepresent-able alterity and a very radical demand for recognition.

The body according to biologism. The question of resistance, the question ofcritical-emancipatory praxis, calls for a body-subject: a subjective body capableof assuming the functions of an intelligent historical agent. However, when Foucaultdoes not get entangled in a version of historicism, he gets caught in an equallyuntenable version of biologism. Biologism reduces the body to a mass of drives.This means that the body is denied any inherent order, any order of its own. Foucaultcannot conceptualise a body inherently organised, already organised from the verybeginning, for social interactions. And since most adult bodies obviously areinteractional, are orderly, he can only suppose that interaction and order have beensocially imposed. His version of historicism does not only deny the body anyinherent order in general; more specifically, it also denies the body any inherentlyinteractionalorder which is why that conception leads us to think that the order,the sociability, we see must have been socially imposed.

Both interpretations of the body point back to Freud, who conceived the bodyin libidinal terms and thought that civilisation could civilise this body in only oneway, namely: by repression. For Freud, the civilised ego is a projection whichis cast and imposed by society, and which emerges on the surface of the libidinal

body. Freud seems not to recognise the possibility that the process of socialisa-tion could work, instead, by educing, by cultivating, by bringing forth and carryingforward, an implicate order that is always already social.

There is a conception of the body which figures in the texts of Nietzsche andFreud and also in the thinking of those whom these texts have influenced: Marcuse,Lacan, Bataille, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari. According to thisconception, the body is a chaos of drives. It is conceived in the image of Dionysus,a god of excess, knowing no measure: a body of self-abandonment, of intoxicationand wildness. And it is this body conceived in his image and reflecting his narcis-sism, which Freud wanted to repress, to tame and civilise and which the others,

from Nietzsche through Deleuze and Guattari, have wanted to encourage to incite,in fact, to riot. This is the body to which they turned for the energies of socialrevolution.

But while this body may have the brute energy that is necessary to destroy theolder order, an order of repression, it does not have the knowledge and wisdom not even, it must be said, the empowerments of language to construct a neworder. Freedom becomes the victory of impulse over reason.13 The body thesethinkers celebrate is eroswithout logos;a body without reason, without a sense ofmeasure, without any order of its own. Consequently, it cannot know the differencebetween reason and domination; nor can it carry within it a concretely felt sense

of the difference between justice and injustice. Moreover, this body is monado-logical, steeped in a primordial solipsism akin to madness; totally self-contained,without interaction, it neither needs nor has any mature interpersonal relationships.It is a body incapable, therefore, of ethical relationships. Without any recognitionof the other asother, without any understanding of reciprocity, it cannot carry


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forward the utopian dream that, as I shall demonstrate using the hermeneuticalphenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, is already encoded in the flesh of every body,although encoded only in a very preliminary, rudimentary way, a way which ofcourse needs to be carried forward: the dream, that is, of a genuinely humancommunity, and of a body governed by the principle of justice.

In Logicsof Disintegration, Peter Dews observes, quite correctly, that Foucaultslack of any theory of drives or of any interest in the internal complexity of thepsyche. . . is a lacuna in, not a virtue of, his work, since... he gravitates towardsa position in which the very aim of political action appears to be the abrogationof reflection and the cancellation of self-consciousness. Since the autonomous subjectis, for Foucault, already the product of subjection to power, the aim of politicalactions cannot be to enhance or expand this autonomy. . . . Foucaults positionimplies at the very least an extreme spontaneism. . . [and a] theoreticallyunelaborated notion of resistance, a corporeally grounded opposition to the powerwhich. . . moulds human beings into self-identical subjects [and] implies a hostilityto any form of conscious formulation of aims and strategic calculation.14 Andhe notes, that, when Foucault was asked the question, Are resistances to power,then, essentially physical in character? What about the content of struggles, theaspirations that manifest themselves in them?, Foucault was evasive.15 Dewsastutely locates the problem. But he errs a surprising inconsistency in thinkingthat what Foucault needs is a more positive theory of the libidinal body.16 Tobe sure, Foucault does not have a satisfactory understanding of the libidinal body.

But even if he did, he would still not be able to give an adequate account andby that I mean an empowering account of resistances to power, since this requiresrelating the content of struggles their bodily experienced meaning to anembodied rationality. What Foucault needs, therefore, is a phenomenologicalunderstanding of the body of experience, the body-subject or body-agent, and ofits capacity to generate valid social meaning. It is self-defeating to ground oppositionto power in the body, when the nature of the body is interpreted as a protean massof unruly drives. Our phenomenological experience informs us that the body whichembodies the political subject is not a chaos, but an order: in fact, a quite distinctivenatural order; an order of nature which is neither totallyprogrammed by biology

nortotally formed by the internalisation of socially imposed rules.Near the end of his life, Foucault finally distanced himself from structuralismand returned to an acknowledgement of the subject. We have to promote newforms of subjectivity, he said, through refusal of this kind of individuality whichhas been imposed on us for several centuries.17 In What Is Enlightenment?,he argued that we need to think through a critical ontology of ourselves as ahistorical-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond.18 This ontologyhas to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanentbody of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude,an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one

and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed onus and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.19 Thus, thegrowth of autonomy finally becomes a question, for him, of the growth ofcapabilities.20

However, despite his familiarity with the phenomenological work of Merleau-


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Ponty, Foucault never granted the body of experienceany recognition. Even whenhe abandoned structuralism and acknowedged the importance of the subject, hedid not abandon interpretations of the body incompatible with this subjectivity.If biologism extremely subjectivizes the body and historicism objectifies it, whatwe need to think is a body of experience, for this alone is an interpretation whichempowers the embodied subject while accommodating the partial truths in theseother interpretations. Bearing in mind R. D. Laings observation, in ThePoliticsof Experience, that if experience is destroyed, our behaviour becomes destruc-tive,21 I want to argue against the view that what I am calling the body ofexperience is somehow less real than the objectivity of our collective life.Foucault neglects the practical body of our experience. During the years whenhis thinking was swayed by structuralism, the body that figured in his discoursewas always seen from the outside: only its objectivity mattered; but when, afterstructuralism, he returned to the subject and proclaimed a subjective body, thebody he celebrated was a Freudian body interpreted in a Nietzschean way: a bodywithout any order of its own, a body capable of expressing only wildness, egoismand irrationality.22

Although Foucault began, as the What Is Enlightenment? paper indicates,to give some attention to the growth of capabilities, one thing that is strikinglymissing from his interpretation of the body is a recognition of its competenciesand capacities, and of the possibility that there could be practices of the selfwhich would not be technologies technologising the body,23 but which instead

would respect, and draw on, the nature of the bodys own resources, its ownorganismic values, skills and capabilities, carrying them forward; not only intofurther self-development and individuation, but also into constructive social action,types of praxis which would make society more consistent with, and more responsiveto, the bodys inherently social, inherently utopian, constellation of needs, desiresand dreams.24

Since power is experienced as oppressive when it neglects, blocks or deniesthe developmental needs of our bodys natural competencies and capacities, anunderstanding of the body that is attentive to its various capabilities can empowerthe body and channel its experience into critical-emancipatory praxis. Thus, for

example, the more we develop our ability to listen, the more sensitive we are likelyto become to the needs, concerns and interests that are of importance to peoplein circumstances very different from our own. Because Foucault ignored ourembodied abilities, and, more generally, the practical body of experience, he missedan opportunity to relate his conception of practices of the self to processescultivating the bodys experience and capabilities in non-coercive, non-manipulativeways.25 Thus he missed an opportunity to adduce critical-emancipatory praxisfrom an ideality whose normative axis is already operative (as I shall showin Part II) in the inherent order of the flesh. Our bodies carry dreams of a bettersocial order, a more fulfilling body politic, dreams already announced through

the felt needs and demands of our competencies and capacities: dreems alreadycalling us to their vocation: for example, through the channels of our capacities and our needs for speaking and listening. Unfortunately, because of our socialand cultural conditioning, we are for the most part much too deeply cut off fromthe nature of our own bodies to realize their inherent norms and dreams.


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Recent research in the field of child and developmental psychology now providesan abundance of compelling evidence to support the proposition that the infant isbiologically endowed with a nature that is already organised by an order of its own:an order that is determinate but not fixed; interactional from the very beginning, ratherthan solitary and monadic; always already predisposed toward sociality, rather thaninstinctual aggressivity; and even already proto-moral, rather than totally wildand uncivilized.26 Summing up the current state of knowledge concerning mother-infant relationships, one researcher asserts that the early infant possesses capacitiesfor interpersonal interactions on a level that was previously believedunattainable.27 The body in a Hobbesian state of Nature is nothing but a myth.

This research is extremely significant, and its implications for our practicesof child-rearing and education, for the assumptions of social theory, and for thecritique of our cultural institutions are very far-reaching. In Part II of this paper,I want to examine what Merleau-Pontys phenomenology can contribute to ourunderstanding of how reason and justice are embodied. And I want to work onthe problematic Foucault articulated in his Preface to The History of Sexuality,vol. II when he wrote that he was trying to analyze the formation of a certainmode of relation to the self in the experience of the flesh. However, instead ofanalyzing experiences belonging to the past, I shall attempt to show how Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the flesh opens up not only the possibility of an historic-ally different ontology of ourselves and historically different self-formations, butalso the possibility of a radically different framework for conceptualizing the

historical subject of praxis.

2. The Corporeal Schematism: An Embodied Sense of Justice

In Body/Power, Foucault declared: I believe that the great fantasy is theidea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. For the phenomenonof the social body is the effect, not of consensus, but of the materiality of poweroperating upon the very bodies of individuals.28 His position, however, con-fuses the is and the ought, the fact and the ideal; and it therefore reducesutopian-emancipatory possibilities to oppressive actualities. I agree that the social

body is an effect of power; but I repudiate his unwillingness to think the possibilityof a social body achieved by rational consensus. By rejecting this possibility, hebetrays the very bodies of individuals, for they carry, as I shall now try to show,a utopian-emancipatory potential, wrought into their very flesh. Even though theword consensus comes from the senses and sensibility, Foucault would have ussuppress the dreams carried in and by our bodies. Against Foucault, I want toargue (i) that the nature of the body is intersubjective, i.e., intercorporeal, (ii) thatintercorporeality is inherently interactional, or social, (iii) that this interaction rootsus in a dialectic of reversibility, (iv) that reversibility establishes the experientialmatrix for reciprocity, and (v) that our bodies accordingly bear a utopian potential,

the sense, or dream, of a collectively achieved and shared understanding, in thereciprocities of which this reversibility would be realised and fulfilled. I shall useMerleau-Pontys phenomenolgy to bring to light the bodys deeply felt sense ofjustice the natural, inaugural, and most radical grounding of the ideal of justicein the body of our experience.


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In an interview published in Power/Knowledge, Foucault opined that theproblem is not so much that of defining a political position (which is to choosefrom a pre-existing set of possibilities), but to imagine and bring into being new

schemas of politicization.29 I agree. But Foucault, despite his problematising ofthe body, failed to realise that the human body already carries within it a newschema of politicization: a schema we have continually overlooked and neglectedto explore. Current research documents the fact that the infant is born with awide range of organizational schemas previously unheard of.30 Here I shallexamine the phenomenology of this schematism, adducing the formation of a senseof justice.

In The Childs Relations with Others, Merleau-Ponty fleshed out in pheno-menological terms the concept of a corporeal schema and considered how thisschema could be elaborated through practices of the self, practices of bodily self-awareness and self-understanding: To the extent that I can elaborate and extendmy corporeal schema, to the extent that I can acquire a better organised experienceof my own body, to that very extent will my consciousness of my own body ceasebeing a chaos in which I am submerged and lend itself to a transfer to others.31

In this essay, however, Merleau-Ponty was still conceptualising the body in arelatively familiar form. Not so in the papers published posthumously in The Visibleand the Invisible. Here, the familiar body is deepened: my body is openedout; it becomes an elemental flesh, a being of depths. Going into these depths,Merleau-Ponty confirms experientially, i.e., phenomenologically, the recent

research findings in child and developmental psychology. Moreover, he also givesexperiential support to biology. Thus, for example, whereas ego psychology, byidentifying, as Joel Whitebook says in Reason and Happiness, the biologicalsources of the ego, actually locates some of the biological roots of sociation,Merleau-Pontys phenomenological work makes explicit the experiential roots ofsociation roots that may be correlated with the biological.32

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty reflects on his sense that, ashe puts it, my body ... discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongationof my intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. Henceforth, as theparts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other persons

are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymousexistence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits bothbodies simultaneously.33 This prolongation is also our openness. From the verybeginning, there is a primordial sociability shaping and moving our bodies. Ourbodieshold us opento others from the very beginning the prepersonal beginning of our lives. Moreover, our prolongation in the other is a relationship that isalways, in principle, open to further extension. The inherent communicativenessof an elemental flesh, a flesh we share even as it keeps us apart, makes this extensionpossible, and indeed desirable. What socialization can do is educate draw outand develop the sociality-potential already inscribed in the flesh. In his pheno-

menological work, then, Merleau-Ponty directs our bodily awareness to the factof our intercorporeality, a dimension of our embodiment governed by theintertwining of my life with the other lives, of my body with the visible things,by the intersection of my perceptual field with that of the others.34 And he helpsus retrieve and redeem the sense of this experience.


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Now, the principal concept Merleau-Ponty uses to interpret the nature of theflesh, the body of depths, is reversibility. It is this reversibility of the flesh,he says, which is the ultimate truth.35 In his Working Notes, he tells usthat reversibility is the idea that every perception is doubled with a counter-perception. . . , is an act with two faces; [so it could almost be said that] one nolonger knows who speaks and who listens.36 When I listen to myself, to mywords, to the sound of my voice, I can hear others: I hear others inside myself. Conversely, when I listen to others, I can hear myself: I hear myself in,or through, the others in my world. Similarly, I can see others in myself andsee myself in others. We act as mirrors for one another; we reflect one another;we resonate and echo one another. Our positions are so deeply intertwined thatthey tend, on a level of which we are often more or less unconscious, to transposeand reverse themselves in a surprising dialectic of reversibility. Social co-existenceis a dialectic of transpositions. In the moment of self-recognition, we see andhear ourselves in a reversibility that could happen only by grace of the presenceof others.

Now, this phenomenon of reversibility is a fact of the utmost significance forour ethical and political life. As Dews argues, socialization depends on a mutualrecognition of subjects, however distorted.37 (Of course, if there is any distor-tion in the mutual acknowledging, there will be a corresponding distortion in thesocialization. This is a phenomenon that has been studied and confirmed in thecontext of parent-infant relationships. Of special importance, in this regard, is the

work of Harry Sullivan, Harold Searles, Gregory Bateson, and Ronald Laing.)38

But, as Dews points out, neither Adorno nor Horkheimer, despite their sophisticatedpsychologies, ever articulated an adequate theoretical recognition of the processof reciprocity-formation specific to the social domain.39 And Foucault gave norecognition at all. Dews accordingly challenges the fundamental post-structuralistassumption that identity can never be anything other than the suppression ofdifference. . . 40 Foucaults genealogies of the self, and his studies of self-formative practices, show no recognition whatsoever of the possiblity that an identitycan be developed and sustained through experiences of non-identity as in, forexample, the communicative interactions characteristic of the social domain.41

Post-structuralist thinkers Lacan, Foucault, Derrida seem stubbornly andunjustifiably committed to the position that individual identity is always a reifica-tion: that it requires fixation, or absolute unchangingness, and that it can be formed,therefore, only through submission, the passive internalization of externally imposedauthority. They do not see that identity can be formed through interactions ofidentification and differentiation.42 This, however, submits all processes ofidentity-formation to what Dews calls the logic of disintegration. Clearly, thisis not a satisfactory conclusion to stop at, although we should appreciate the critical,negative points in the post-structuralist and Frankfurt School analyses of identity-formation. Here, then, I want to argue that Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of

the self-other dialectic, worked out long before post-structuralism, lets us see aprocess of self-formation which avoids the problematic on which these otheraccounts are shattered. Indeed, I think we may say, with words from Habermas,that his phenomenology calls to mind a relationship between persons in whichthe accommodating, identifying externalization of one partner in relation to the


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model of the other does not require the sacrifice of that partners own identity,but preserves dependency and autonomy at once.43

Showing, as it does, how identities are formed through intercorporeal trans-positions, Merleau-Pontys phenomenology provides a grounding in this body ofour experience for Habermass contention that Subjects who reciprocally recognizeeach other as such must consider each other as identical, insofar as they bothtake up the position of subjects; they must at all times subsume themselvesand the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation ofreciprocity or recognition demands the non-identity of the one and the other:both must also maintain their difference, for to be a subject implies the claim toindividuation.44

It is essential that we understand the nature of the role of the body in this socialprocess. From his earliest work to his last, Merleau-Ponty sought to establish suchan understanding. In The Indirect Language, for example, he showed that itis characteristic of cultural gestures to awaken in all others at least an echo, ifnot a consonance.45 We live in a social world: we inhabit this world. But theworld also inhabits us. I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel himliving in mine.46 These phenomenological observations tell us things we needto keep in mind as we think about structures of mutual recognition, the achievementof mutual understanding, the sorts of conditions that are necessary for reciprocity,and how to encourage those kinds of practices which would build both the formationof consensus and the tolerance of difference into our institutions.

Foucault denounced phenomenology, accusing it of transcendental narcissism,just as, earlier, Marxists had accused it of idealism and subjectivism. Theseaccusations are justified, when they target the work of Husserl. But Merleau-Pontymade use of phenomenology to ground his argument that, rather than beingessentially self-contained and isolated from others, which is how we have alwaysunderstood ourselves in the discourse of consciousness, we are, as embodied, joinedinseparably, inseparably bound, to others: inherently predisposed, as bodies, tobe affected by others; touched and moved by their presence. What he shows usis the fact that it is by grace of the flesh that we are gathered with others into aprimordial sociability. This original state of sociability, this original position, gives

us a much-needed touchstone, a normative ground, for perceiving and judgingthe character of our social practices and political institutions. Since our bodiesare from the very beginning interactional, not monadic, but proto-social, and evenprotomoral, individuation requires, and is, a process of socialization. However,since our bodies are already, from their very beginning, partially autonomic,partially self-regulating, biologically organized for a certain degree and level ofsystemic independence, we require that processes of socialization serve the needsof individuation. And we can draw on these needs, formed in our bodies, to judgethe prevailing practices and institutions of socialization and to resist or changethem when they are oppressive. Thus is it important to see phenomenologically

that the original position of the embodied practical subject is always alreadyinvolved, involved long before linguistic consciousness, in a dialectic of trans-position, and that the reflexive reversibilities of the flesh constitute a rudimentaryschematism of reciprocities, relationships which are grounded in a transpositionof reversible standpoints and viewpoints, and which lay the ground, however


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precariously, for subsequent discursive engagements aimed at mutual understanding.All interactions are therefore opportunities for the progressive fleshing out of

the bodys originary schematism: this implicate order, this utopian hint, inherentin our initial intercorporeality, of a more developed, more civilized intercorporeality,concretely structured practices and institutions of recognition, communication andreciprocity, generated from within the shared body of social experience.

In The Concept of Nature, a lecture at the Collge de France, Merleau-Pontyspoke of an ideal community of embodied subjects, an intercorporeality.47

This tantalizing vision, communicated all too briefly, needs to be thought inconjunction with something he says in The Visible and the Invisibile: We willhave to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, itsdepth.48 When Merleau-Ponty suggested a name for this ideality, he proposedthe term reversibility. Reversibility refers to our corporeal schematism, theelementary form of reciprocity our bodies already know about long before theyare of an age to be tutored. In short, it refers to the fact that the body is inherentlyorderedfor participation in structures of mutual recognition, structures that constitutethe very root of our sense of justice. Since this transpositional reversibility isstructured into the inherent order of the body, I think we are justified in appropriatingthe concept of a corporeal schematism to describe it.

The infant body embeds the child in an initial community, a syncreticsociability.49 The childs body is always already endowed, always alreadyinformed, prior to its participation in the processes of socialisation, by an operative

schema, a prototype, in fact, of the ideal body politic: a schema of organisimcprinciples woven into its tissues, its musculature, its organs and limbs of perceptionand action: an incarnate dream, born of the flesh. The intercorporeal schematismis initially, to be sure, only rudimentary; it needs to be developed; but it can bedeveloped only through the processes of socialization. Its development is notautomatic or inevitable. And not all processes will draw it out. Only somekindsof educational interactions (Bildungsprozesse) are sufficiently harmonious with,and sufficiently attuned to, the needs and claims of the schematism, the bodysown order, to be able to carry forward, life-affirmingly, the values and dreamsthat are inherent in, and constitutive of, our most universal organismic capacities.

However, if we want to build a society truly organised by principles of justice,then we must avoid distorted communicative relationships,50 and we mustbegin to initiate children into the life of our society in ways that recognise andrespect the organismic roots of an ethics of care and a politics of reciprocity andjustice.

The rule of justice depends on structures of reciprocity, an ethics of communica-tive rationality. But reciprocity, in turn, depends on the bodys experience andunderstanding of reversibility: the reversing of roles and points of view. John Rawlsconstrues the sense in our sense of justice to be nothing but a cognitivedisposition or endowment, a form of understanding.51 While it is of course

necessary to spell out in cognitive terms what our sense of justice requires,Merleau-Ponty brings out the rootedness of justice in our innate sensibility; andopens up the possibility of grounding it in the transpositions, the communicativereversibilities, ordering the subjective body. Thanks to the work of Merleau-Ponty, we can find, in the experienced reversibilities of the flesh, an organismic


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basis for the principle of reciprocity. Though I have only been able, here, toarticulate a few hints, we can begin to explore how reciprocity, a necessary con-dition of social justice, carries forward and fulfills the need which an organismicreversibility primally inaugurates and for which it demands the most vigilant,most enduring recognition.

The order of the experiential body makes it innately, in Bourdieus terms, asocially informed body.52 What Bourdieu calls the habitus, namely, aprinciple generating and unifying all practices, the system of inseparably cognitiveand evaluative structures which organizes the vision of the world in accordancewith the objective structures of a determinate state of the social world,53 pointsback to a more originary principle, ordering the body from its very beginning.This principle is the corporeal schematism constitutive of the flesh. More sothan his sociology of the habitus, however, Merleau-Pontys phenomenology ofour intercorporeality empowers the embodied practical subject, redeeming itscapacity to address history and make claims on society, speaking with eloquenceof its deepest needs, concerns and dreams.

In Culture and Domination,John Brenkman locates a point where the immanentcritique of Horkheimer and Adorno gets into trouble:

Having counterposed in absolute terms a reason that serves the aims of self-preservation and a reason that would seek the truth, and having made the formerthe driving force of civilization as a whole, Horkheimer and Adorno narrow theresources of social and cultural critique to the suppressed upsurge of the non-

instrumentalized, resistant energies of nature (the external world, the body, theunconscious). By their own account, however, this countermovement to instrumentalreason is impervious to conceptualization or discursive thought. It can expressivelyindict the prevailing social order, but it cannot generate categories of socialanalysis.54

I concur in Brenkmans assessment of the dilemma confronting Horkheimer andAdorno. But it should be clear by now, even from the phenomenology of inter-corporeality we have very briefly touched on, that Brenkman himself has narrowedthe resources of social and cultural critique by assuming, with them, and withFoucault, that the body is impervious to conceptualization or discursive thought,

and that it can expressively indict the prevailing social order, but cannot generatecategories of social analysis.

Before we proceed to a consideration of Habermas I would like to review thesteps we have taken in Part II, clarifying the logic of the argument and spellingout my claim that the phenomenology of embodiment presented here enables usto understand how the body can indeed perform both of the practical tasks Brenkmannames. I have argued for the following propositions, (i) The human body has is an order of its own. This order, an immanent logos of the flesh, has not beenrecognized, (ii) This order is alreadygeared into the mutual recognitions of socialinteraction: it is already pro-social: the bodys pro-social behaviour is not, and

does not need to be, totally introduced by the work of society. (iii) Societys workof socialization, and its vision of moral development, should respect, and beresponsive to, the primal order of sociality already inherent in the childs body,(iv) Reciprocity is a socially produced discursive order; it is also the only orderwe know of that adequately carries forward thereversibilities in which the bodys


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own order is initially manifest. (v) The order of the body the bodys own order needs, and orders, a just society. Only a society governed by the principles ofjustice, a society structured for the realization of democratic pluralism, can fulfillthe diverse needs deeply implicate in the nature of our bodies. Our bodies requirethat, whatever their differences may be, all political systems should be at leastconsistent with their implicate normativity. But we have no a priori reason tosuppose that there is one and only one political system which could harmoniouslyfulfill this order, and which would be uniquely fated or prescribed. Our biologydoes not, and cannot, totally determine any specific political arrangements. Never-theless, given the fact that the order of our bodies is an order structured byreversibility, it is clear that what the body needs for its fulfillment is a social ordergoverned, at the very least, by forms of reciprocity and an ethics of communicativerationality.

(vi) There is a critical function implicit in the concept of the flesh: an implicitcritique of society and its body politic. Measured against the justice in the flesh,both capitalism and the ego are questioned and indicted. The dominance of theego, the distinctively modern form of subjectivity, is contested by the communicativeinfrastructures of an inherently social intercorporeality which precedes its indivi-duated formation, while capitalism is indicted insofar as it (a) reinforces the ruleof the ego, (b) perpetuates the grounds of a subject-centred reason, and (c) doesnot promote conditions of reciprocity which would realize in a new social orderthe reversibilities and transpositions the forms of mutual recognition already

schematized by the flesh. Although the ego-body (the ego-centred body) hasappeared in many different societies and cultures, our analysis points to theconclusion that, since the ego-centred body is split off from the reversibilities ofthe flesh from experiences of reversibility which lay the ground for reciprocity,to the extent that the capitalist social system privileges the ego-body of bourgeoischaracter and promotes its rule, to that same extent capitalism can only be inimicalto the experiential grounding of principles of justice. Thus, our hermeneuticalphenomenology works for the cause of justice by developing our experience ofthe flesh and its reversals, and by contesting the historical alliance between capitalismand the ego-body. (vii) Working for social justice today calls for promoting new

forms of subjectivity, as Foucault finally argued. And this means collaboratingwith the pro-social order of our bodies to achieve in society at large a level ofmoral development in which questions of social justice, and the communicativeprocedures that reflection on these questions require, are of paramount concern:a possibility we cannot recognize, without understanding that neither the monadicego (in the discourse of Cartesian metaphysics) nor the disorganized body of drives(in the discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis) should continue to represent for usthe distinctive social character of the human self.51

(viii) In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty argued that, To understandand judge a society, one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond

upon which it is built.56 I think that Merleau-Ponty has contributed significantlyto this very project, casting a penetrating light on the depths and dimensions ofthis human bond, and letting it be seen and recognized as a justice in the flesh.Justice is not just an abstract ideal, a principle conceived by the mind it is alsoa critical measure rooted in the body. By virtue of the body, we carry within us


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a rudimentary, preconceptually formed sense of justice.57 This experientialground of justice cannot be recognized, however, unless we rescue the body fromreification: social practices and cultural discourses that continue to objectify thebody and deny it the power to mean, to speak, to reason, to generate new categoriesof social analysis. The body of experience is the practical subjectof this power.

3. Habermas

Recently, taking up the feminist/postmodernist critique of Enlightenment Reasonthat began with the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas has argued that,

Instead of following Nietzsches path of a totalising and self-referential critique of

reason, . . . it is more promising to seek this end through the analysis of the alreadyoperative potential for rationality contained in the everyday practices of communica-tion. Here the validity dimensions of prepositional truth, normative rightness, andsubjective truthfulness, or authenticity, are intertwined with one another. From thisnetwork of a bodily and interactively shaped, historically situated reason, ourphilosophical tradition selected out only the single thread of prepositional truth andtheoretical reason and styled it into the monopoly of humanity. (Questions andCounterquestions)58

Habermass recognition of the body of reason, and his support for its speechin the discourse of politics, are significant provocations. Yet Habermass recent

work does very little to flesh out the revolutionary implications of this criticalinterpretation. Marcuse is the only thinker associated with the Frankfurt Schooland its critical theory movement who has attempted to derive from the body acritical, utopian-emancipatory praxis of reason. Unfortunately, he wasnot suffi-ciently critical of the Freudian theory of drives, and this prevented him from workingout an adequately critical, adequately effective concept and praxis of reason.Marcuses new rationality is embodied, but its embodiment is understood ina way that makes it only expressive, only aesthetic: Marcuse ignored the ethicaland communicative functions of reason and failed to recognise that it is the bodyof experience which carries these functions.

In Moral Development and Ego Identity, Habermas contends that individuationrequires not only cognitive mastery of general levels of communication, but alsothe ability to give ones own needs their due in these communicative structures;us long as the ego is cut off from its internal nature and disavows the dependencyon needs that still await suitable interpretations, freedom, no matter how muchit is guided by principles, remains in truth unfree in relation to existing systemsof norms.59 I wholeheartedly agree. But we must not forget that the concept ofan internal nature lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations and that thehegemony of some of these interpretations has had the ideological effect of cuttingus off even more deeply from our internal nature, e. g., by concealing and denying

the alienation. It is not only our needs which require suitable interpretation; theconcept of an internal nature, and the fact of our historical alienation from thisnature, also need satisfactory interpretation.

Now, Habermas has recently put need-interpretation on the agenda forphilosophical and political debate. Commendable as this is, it must be pointed


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out that he ignores the body of felt experience: an intelligent body capable of self-reflection, a body capable of articulating its motives and reasons for action. But,to ignore the body is to neglect the rootsof need-interpretation; thus it is, in effect,to perpetuateour alienation from internal nature, a body of needs which must firstbe recognised, before it can be redeemed through processes of interpretation andcommunication.

So long as the bodyof needs is ignored, how can internal nature be movedinto a utopian perspective? Before its contents, our needs and affects, becomecommunicatively accessible (to quote from Seyla Benhabibs Critique, Norm andUtopia), this body needs to be recognised and its authority respected.60 Whatdoes this entail? Developing some thoughts argued by Habermas, Benhabib suggeststhat this means we must get in touch with those sedimented and frozen imagesof the good and happiness in the light of which we formulate needs andmotives,61 and that our reflexive questioning in this regard must be accom-panied by an ability to articulate our needs linguistically, i.e., by an ability tocommunicate with others about them.62 And yet, at the same time that shesupports a discourse of need-interpretation based on the retrieval of utopian imagessedimented in our internal nature, Benhabib gives an account which cuts usoff from the body of experience, the body of needs, arguing for an analysis whichimplicitly disembodies the images. Thus, for example, in The Utopian Dimensionin Communicative Ethics, she writes: In the semantic heritage of a culturaltradition are contained the images and anticipations of a fulfilled life-history and

of a collective life-form in which justice does not exclude solidarity, and freedomis not realized at the expense of happiness.63 Now, I have no quarrel at all withher about the semantic heritage of our cultural tradition. But I must dispute whatseems to be an excessive linguistification: the implication that these utopian imagesand anticipations are contained, first and foremost, or only, in our semanticheritage. I would argue, rather, that they are carried, first and foremost, by thebody of experience. By cutting us off from this body, the analysisshe proposesdoes not enable us to make political use of the bodys inwrought wisdom. Thiswisdom canarticulate itself. If we know how to work with the body of experience,we can bring this wisdom into language and into the realm of public discourse. 64

Such body-work is the practice of the self I am exploring in this paper.Returning to our reflections on the schematism of intercorporeality to which I

gave articulation in working out Merleau-Pontys concept of the flesh, I want toargue that, in the dimension from which we are cut off, there are more than utopianimages and anticipations to be awakened: there is also an ideal normativityinherent in the intersubectivity of the flesh; and, correlatively, an experiential basisfor insisting on principles which would lead to the formation of anew body politic,a new political order, since there are principles always already schematised by,and in, the body: principles initially inscribed, inscribed in the auditory flesh, forexample, as a corporeal schema implicitly orchestrating the conduct of our lives

despitea form of society which even today suppresses and distorts its functioning.If we want to bring about the social production and transmission of a more

rational, more reciprocity-governed process of consensus-formation, then it seemsto me that we need to give more thought to the body of depths, the body whoseschematism of reversibility constitutes a bodily felt need for recognition and


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development within communicative structures that will promote the bodysfulfillment in procedures of reciprocity at the same time that they will themselvesbenefit from the contributions of abodily-groundedreciprocity.

Just as, for Habermas, the ideal speech situation, the ideal condition forreaching a rational, non-coercive consensus, is necessarily implied in thecompetency-structure already inherent in language itself, so the reciprocity thatis necessary in the constitution of a rational and just social order is an organsmicfulfillment already implied in the structural transpositions and reversibilitiesthat already organise and predispose the flesh. Merleau-Pontys late work in thephenomenology of perception, detailing in experientially accessible terms theintertwinings, transpositions, and reversibilities always already constitutive oflooking and listening, suggests the proposition that there is a bodily grounded needfor a society procedurally organised to be in consonance with the body politic thatis already deeply schematised by the intercorporeality informing the visionary andauditory body-self. Empirical research, tracking the mutual reflecting in theinteractions of gazes, and registering the responsive resonances and motor echoesthat occur in normal listening, now confirms his phenomenology in behaviouralterms.

Merleau-Pontys phenomenology provides an experiential grounding forHabermass analysis, bringing out a reciprocity-structure always implicit in thespeech situation as we experience it. He shows how the acquisition of languageis itself a phenomenon of identification. To learn to speak is to learn to play a

series, of roles, to assume a series of conducts or linguistic gestures.65

Thus, inthe very process of learning to speak, we learn the reversibility of positions androles that is later necessary for the practice of reciprocity. Moreover, his con-tributions to the phenomenology of listening bring out the fact that listening,too, teaches us reversibility: to listen to another is to learn what the world is likefrom a position that is not ones own; to listen is to reverse position, role, andexperience. To refuse this reversibility is to refuse to listen, to turn a deaf ear.

I think it can be demonstrated that, just as our speaking with others is implicitlygoverned by certain norms, constitutive of what Habermas calls the ideal speechsituation, so too is our listening. Listening, like speech, is not only a bioiogical

endowment, but also a capacity, a competence, an acquired skill; and as such,it too can be developed. If listening is a capacity, then there is a potential whichcan be either neglected or realised, either left to nature and circumstance ordeveloped and fulfilled. And if we need to realise and fulfill this potential, weneed to assume that there must be norms and standards that implicitly govern ourlistening.66 Although Habermas can see a significant correlation between egoidentity and moral development, he does not consider the fact that listening is adevelopmental capacity, and that its developmental stages are normatively relatedto our self-development as moral agents. Note that the word obedience meanslistening from below. Now if, as Erikson and Kohlberg have demonstrated,

obedience is characteristic of a very early stage of moral development, shouldwe not suppose that the correlation continues, and that, as obedience gives wayto an ethics of autonomy, responsibility and care, the capacity for listening wouldnot only undergo correspondingdevelopmental changes, but would also, by virtueof these very changes, facilitate the further development of moral character as


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a whole? This is what I mean when I say that Habermas ignores our embodiment.His neglect is, however, unfortunate, because it means that he misses the normative,moral-political groundwork of perceptual processes: processes schematizing theidealreciprocity-relations in which, and as which, they would be genuinely fulfilled.One way for us, both as individuals and as society, to approximate the conditionsof the ideal speech situation would be to work on developing our capacity forlistening.

In conclusion, let me suggest that the task of overcoming all the metaphysicalabstractions surrounding the logos,67 and the task of experientially grounding aregulative ideal of the body politic in the inherent need-and-dream-order whichis the logosof the human body, are tasks that still lie very much before us. I haveonly sketched their outlines in the briefest way. We need a utopian-emancipatorydiscourse on the body no less than we need the critical-analytic discourse thatFoucault set in motion.68 And this means that we need to understand the natureof our bodies, asking ourselves what this nature must be if it makes sense to call,as Habermas does, for a communicative reason embodied in intersubjectivelife-contexts. Habermass paradigm of mutual understanding, that is, of theintersubjective relationship between individuals who are socialized through commu-nication and reciprocally recognize one another, will remain forever an abstractionunless it can be drawn from the inherently interactional nature of our bodies andinstitutionalized infulfillmentof our bodies intersubjectivity, a potential constitutiveof our needs and predispositions as embodied practical subjects.69

NOTES

1. This is a revised version of the paper I read March 10, 1988 in San Francisco, at a symposium ofthe Western Political Science Association. That paper and this revision are greatly abbreviated versionsof Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book, The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change, andthe Closure of Metaphysics (London, New York: Routledge, Chapman, & Hall, 1989). I am gratefulto my colleague, Thomas McCarthy, who read this chapter and gave me his comments, criticisms,and suggestions for improvement. I also want to thank Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Gendlin, Joel Kovel,and Roger Levin for their participation in the critical readings that preceded the present text.

2. Michel Foucault, Body/Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,

1972-1977 (New York, 1980), pp. 58-59.3. Ibid.4. Ibid.5. Ibid., p. 97.6. Ibid., p. 186.7. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Memory, Countermemory, Practice (Ithaca,

1977), p. 48. For an argument against Foucault on this point, see Eugene Gendlin, A PhilosophicalCritique of the Concept of Narcissism: The Significance of the Awareness Movement, in DavidM. Levin (ed.), Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia,and Depression(New York, 1987).

8. Charles Taylor, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, in David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A CriticalReader (London and New York, 1986), p. 93. For a lucid and insightful discussion of matters related

to these criticisms of Foucault, see Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thoughtand the Claims of Critical Theory (London, 1987), esp. pp. 109-170. Adorno fights the prioritizingof a libidinal unconscious, arguing that this does not in fact enable the self to resist oppression and achieveits dream of freedom, but rather, on the contrary, denies it the possibility of rational motivation, andultimately, therefore, all capacity for praxis. I agree. So I hope it is clear that my defense of the bodysexperience is likewise a repudiation of the prioritizing and defense of the libidinal unconscious.


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9. See Karl Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, in Quinton Hoare (ed.), The Early Writings of KarlMarx(New York, 1975), 335.

10. See Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst (New York, 1981),

esp. pp. 63-64, 233, 258. Kovel argues persuasively for the bodys transhistoricity, and he doesso without ever removing the body from the forces of history. Also see Gad Horowitz, TheFoucaultian Impasse: No Sex, No Self, No Revolution, Political Theory, vol. 15, no 1. (February,1987), pp. 61-80.

11. See Nancy Fraser, Social Movements vs. Disciplinary Bureaucracies: The Discourses ofSocial Needs, CHS Occasional Papers, no. 8 (Minneapolis: Center for Humanistic Studies,University of Minnesota), p. 23. I want to signal an important point of difference between Fraserand myself: Fraser simply rejects the deep self and a body of depths.

12. See Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id(New York, 1960), p. 16.13. See Dews, op. cit, p. 142: Adorno considers [the freedom of] post-liberal capitalism to

be characterized by a progressive liquidation of the distinction between the ego and the unconsciousin a narcissistic personality type.

14. Ibid., p. 164. Also see pp. 188-189.15. Ibid., Also see Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 164.16. Dews, op. cit., p. 166.17. Foucault, The Subject and Power, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond

Structuralism and Hermeneutics(Chicago, 1982), p. 216,18. Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New

York, 1984), p. 47.19. Ibid., p. 50.20. Ibid., p. 48.21. Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of Experience(New York, 1967), p. 28.22. See Dews, op. cit., pp. 109-170.23. See Foucault, The Subject and Power, op. cit., p. 208; On the Genealogy of Ethics:

An Overview of Work in Progress, in Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, pp. 351-362; andTechnologies of the Self, in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrik Hutton (eds.), Technologiesof the Self (Amherst, 1988), p. 18. Also see Patrick Huttons chapter, Foucault, Freud, and theTechnologies of the Self, op, cit., pp. 127-140.

24. See Dews, op. cit., pp. 156-162.25. See Eugene Gendlin, Focusing (New York, 1981) for a theoretical and practical understanding

of the bodys immanent organization of norms and values. Also see his paper, ExperientialPhenomenology, in M. Natanson (ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences (Evanston,1973).

26. See A. N. Meltzoff and M. K. Moore, Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by HumanNeonates, Science, vol. 98 (1977); Jerome Kagan, The Nature of the Child (New York, 1984);

Daniel Bar-tal, Prosocial Behavior, Theory and Research (New York, 1976); T. B. Brazelton, EarlyParent-Infant Reciprocity, Progress in Reproductive Medicine, vol. 2 (1985); Z. F. Boukydis, ATheory of Empathic Relations between Parents and Infants, The Focusing Folio, vol. 4, no. 1(1985); Michael Coyle, An Experiential Perspective on the Mother-Infant Relation. The Focusing

Folio, vol.6, no. 1 (1987), Nancy Eisenberg, The Development of Prosocial Behavior (New York,1982); M. L. Hoffman, Is Altruism Part of Nature?, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,vol. 3 (1981); Paul Mussen, Nancy Eisenberg, The Roots of Caring, Sharing and Helping (NewYork, 1977); P. Stratton (ed.), The Psychobiology of the Human Newborn (New York, 1982); andMarion Yarrow, The Emergence and Founding of Pro-social Behaviors in Young Children, inR. Smart (ed.),Readings in Child Development and Relationships(New York, 1977).

27. Michael Coyle, An Experiential Perspective on the Mother-Infant Relationship, TheFocusing Folio, vol. 6, no. 1 (1987), p. 1.

28. Foucault, Body/Power, in Power/Knowledge, p. 55.29. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 190.30. Coyle, op. cit., p. 5.31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Childs Relations with Others, The Primacy of Perception

(Evanston, 1964), p. 118. For extensive empirical research on the body image, see Seymour Fisher,Body Experience in Fantasy and Behavior(New York, 1970).


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32. Joel Whitebook, Reason and Happiness, in Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity(Cambridge and London, 1985), p. 144.

33. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception(New York and London, 1962), p. 354.

34. Merleau-Ponty, Reflection and Interrogation, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, 1968),p. 4935. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 85, and The Visible and the invisible,

p. 264.36. Ibid.37. Dews, op. cit., p. 198.38. See H. S. Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York, 1953); Harold Searles,

Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects (New York, 1965); and R. D. Laing, Sanity,Madness, and the Family(London, 1964).

39. See Dews, op. cit., pp. 197-199.40. Ibid., p. 170.41. Ibid., p. 231.

42. Ibid., p. 228.43. Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity(Cambridge, 1987) p. 68.44. Habermas, Sprachspiel, Intention und Bedeutung, in R. W. Wiggershaus (ed.),

Sprachanalyse und Soziologie(Frankfurt am Main, 1971), p. 334.45. Merleau-Ponty, The Indirect Language, The Prose of the World (Evanston, 1973),

p. 94.46. Merleau-Ponty, The Childs Relations with Others, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston,

1964), p. 146.47. Merleau-Ponty, The Concept of Nature, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France

(Evanston, 1970), p. 82.48. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 152.49. See Merleau-Ponty, The Childs Relations with Others, op. cit., pp. 119-120, 135.50. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 306.51. See John Rawls,A Theory of Justice(Cambridge, 1971).52. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice(Cambridge, 1977), p. 124.53. Ibid.54. John Brenkman, Culture and Domination(Ithaca, 1987), p. 16. Italics added.55. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Anne Lovell (eds.), Psychiatry Inside Out (New York, 1987),

pp. xiii-xiv. Franca Basaglia asks: What in fact is the body of the [psychiatric] innate if it isnot the body of internment? Where can one trace, in this total invasion and expropriation by the[psychiatric] institution, the distance between the I and the self, the interval between the I andthe body necessary for the subject, if these bodies are possessed by the institution, if they are thevery body of the institution? How and where can one enable the subject to emerge in that humiliated

humanity, in those tortured bodies, in those truncated lives? In Foucaults discourse on the body,there is no conceptual space for raising and exploring such questions, since, for Foucault, our socialinstitutions totally produce and possess all bodies.

56. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror(Boston, 1969), p. xiv.57. See Tom R. Tyler, Justice, Self-interest, and the legitimacy of Legal and Political Authority,

in Jane Mansbridge (ed.) Beyond Self-interest to be published by The University of Chicago Press:While we now have evidence that there is a substantial consensus among Americans about whatconstitutes a fair procedure, we do not yet understand the nature of the socialization process whichpresumably underlies such effects. It is necessary for this socialization process to recognise, respect,and cultivate the bodys inherent sense of justice, which makes an essential contribution to theformation of such consensus.

58. Habermas, Questions and Counterquestions, in Richard Bernstein (ed.) Habermas and

Modernity(Cambridge and London, 1985), pp. 196-197. Italics added.59. Habermas, Moral Development and Ego Identity, Communication and the Evolution of

Society(Boston, 1979), p. 78.60. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia(New York, 1986), p. 336.61. Ibid., p. 333.62. Ibid.


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63. Benhabib, The Utopian Dimension in Communicative Ethics, New German Critique, no. 35(Spring/Summer, 1985), p. 83.

64. See Eugene Gendlin, Focusing(New York, 1981) and A Philosophical Critique of the Conceptof Narcissism: The Significance of the Awareness Movement, in D. M. Levin (ed.,

Pathologiesof the Modern Self(New York, 1987).65. Merleau-Ponty, The Childs Relations with Others, op. cit., p. 109.66. See David M. Levin, The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change, and the Closure

of Metaphysics, to be published in 1989 by Routledge, Chapman, and Hall. Also set D. M. LevinThe Opening Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (London and New York, 1988).

67. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 311.68. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud(Boston, 1955).69. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 40.70. Ibid., p. 310.

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1.6 - Lewin, David M. - The Body Politic. the Embodiment of Praxis in Foucault and Habermas (en)

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