Reconfiguring Corporeality in 21st Century (Editors’ Note)
Deeksha Suri | Khalsa College University of Delhi | ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-2977-9543
Faizan Moquim | Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University | ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7698-1656
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.71106/VYTZ9394
Publication: Volume 6 Issue 1
Excerpt | The central thematic of Body Studies—deliberated as far back as the Platonic dichotomy of spirit and flesh where the latter is the physical and of the earth, while the former belongs to the realm of heaven and consciousness (Finol 5)—decisively places the body at the centre of modern discursive practices. At the outset, Body Studies challenges the idea of body being relegated to the margins and subordinated to the “thinking” entity, that is, the mind (5). René Descartes, hailed as the forbearer of modern rational thought, enduringly privileges mind over body to advance his philosophy of dualism: “a thesis which supposes that man consists of two essentially distinct substance, body and soul, which separates at death” (Spicker 8). In this formulation, body is reduced to a vessel or a tool for the mind. It is perceived as an object of study—purely biological or physical, even pre-cultural—and the mind becomes the consciousness, the only way to understand or confirm body’s existence in the world. Elizabeth A. Grosz critiques in a similar manner when she writes that this “dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart” (3).
Key words | Body Studies, Spirit, Flesh, Body, Mind, Cartesian Dualism, Embodied Experience, Lived Body, Intersubjective, Intercorporeal, René Descartes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Deeksha Suri (deeksha.suri80@gmail.com)
Faizan Moquim (faizan.moquim@vips.edu)
MLA Citation for this Article:
Suri, Deeksha and Faizan Moquim. “Reconfiguring Corporeality in 21st Century (Editors’ Note).” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 30 Aug. 2024, pp. v-vii, https://doi.org/10.71106/VYTZ9394.