The Body: Pierced and Inscribed

Two broad kinds of approach to theorizing the body can be discerned in twentieth-century radical thought. One is derived from Nietzshe, Kafka, Foucault, and Deleuze, which I will call 'inscriptive'; the other is more prevalent in psychology, especially psychoanalysis and phenomenology. I will refer to the second approach as the 'lived body.' The first conceives the body as a surface on which social law, morality, and values are inscribed; the second refers largely to the lived experience of the body, the body's internal or psychic inscription. Where the first analyzes a social, public body, the second takes the body-schema or imaginary anatomy as its object(s). It is not clear to me that these two approaches are compatible or capable of synthesis.

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 33.

The body can be regarded as a kind of hinge or threshold: it is placed between a psychic or lived interiority and a more sociopolitical exteriority through the inscription of the body's outer surface. Where psychoanalysis and phenomenology focus on the body as it is experienced and rendered meaningful, the inscriptive model is more concerned with the processes by which the subject is marked, scarred, transformed, and written upon or constructed by the various regimes of institutional, discursive, and nondiscursive power as a particular kind of body.

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 33.