Abstract
This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, but a freedom understood with Spinoza and Nietzsche as grounded in necessity rather than only in the will, and with Arendt and Foucault as a practice rather than an achievement of a sovereign subject. Somatic practices grounded in awareness and acceptance of the body’s necessities, along with attention to the I-can (rather than the I-will) cultivate a form of embodied freedom that bridges care of the self and the political.
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Notes
There are a number of versions of the distinction between the body as experienced from within and without. Following Merleau-Ponty (1962), for example, writers in the phenomenological tradition distinguish the lived body (the space of prereflective experience, including the lived experience of the body) from the corporeal body (the body as object, or the body-for-others). Richard Shusterman, in his defense of “somaesthetics” as a practical philosophy of the body, draws a distinction between “representational” somaesthetics, which “emphasizes the body’s external appearance,” and “experiential” disciplines, which “focus on the aesthetic quality of its ‘inner’ experience” (2000: III-2). Drew Leder (1990) distinguishes the normal state of the body’s “dis-appearance,” or absence from consciousness, as against the intrusion of the body into consciousness that he calls “dys-appearance” at times of pain, illness, injury, or under the Other’s gaze. My initial identification of awareness as mindfulness and as self-consciousness, then, finds echoes in these other distinctions, even if it does not exactly map to them.
The way Foucault backs off from autobiographical answers to interview questions is obviously also related to his epistemological critique of the role of the author, and his political impulse towards a kind of anonymity that would avoid the dangers of his being held up as a “role model.”
Between 1992 and 2006 cosmetic surgical procedures performed by a member of the American Society for Plastic Surgeons increased 578%. A dramatic rate of increase slowed in the mid-2000s, and since 2007 there has been a small overall decline in the number of surgical procedures. The rate of increase in “minimally-invasive” non-surgical procedures (such as Botox, injectable fillers, laser hair removal or skin resurfacing etc.) over the last 10 years, however, has been striking (not least because some of these procedures were only invented in this period). In 2016 ASPS members performed nearly 15.5 million such procedures—an increase of 180% over 2000. https://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/plastic-surgery-statistics.
The clinical literature on whether cosmetic surgery improves mental health (or just makes people feel better about themselves) shows contradictory and indeterminate results, but it clearly doesn’t straightforwardly “fix” psychological struggles relating to body image. See Markey and Markey (2015: esp. 229–236), for a recent survey.
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