2020

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behaviour and Society, 2014

In this paper I examine two limit cases in which the body is threatened: the experience of emergency as described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras, and the experience of illness as described by Jean-Luc Nancy in his autobiographical essay The Intruder. In the first case, the everyday relationship to the body is revealed to be illusionary; the body becomes a powerful yet obedient machine. In the second case, the everyday relationship to the body is also suspended, but this time in favor of a weak and objectified body. I argue that these apparently opposite experiences actually presuppose a similar notion of the everyday body, which I further conceptualize, through Merleau-Ponty and his analysis of the body, as deficient and therefore inherently repressed. The paper concludes with the suggestion that writing about one’s own body may be seen as a way to fight the everyday tendency towards repression, and I propose overwriting as a term that can capture this process.

Universisté de Toulouse le Mirail, 2023

The notion of Person is part of a complex network of philosophical, religious, ideological and scientific references. It most often refers to the individual's right to exist on his own, to act in his own name, to create and control works, to give meaning and value to life, time, things, animals and people. To be a person is, in fact, to be able to manage the conditions that determine you, to resist the alienations that limit you, and to transform them into overcoming and conquest. But does becoming a person mean distancing yourself from others, withdrawing from the social game, cutting yourself off from cultural incentives and models? In other words, does reference to the person imply apology for selfish, egocentric and narcissistic behavior? Most ideologies of the person answer in the negative, insofar as they are based on beliefs and conceptions with collective, religious, moral or political aims... Becoming a person implies overcoming bodily and psychic burdens, as well as overly egocentric individual desires and interests - in a word, freeing oneself from the omnipotence of drives and the dictatorship of the ego, in order to gain access to the behaviors and values of conviviality or abstinence, adherence to a particular cultural dynamic, interpersonal cooperation and social integration. However, the apology of the integrative function runs the risk of minimizing the importance of the assertive function , i.e. the tendency of all individuals to assert themselves, to want to be free to act and choose, to dispose of their bodies and their intellectual and motor capacities. From this point of view, individual and collective attitudes and conceptions concerning a person's relationship with his or her own body are particularly revealing of the ideological stakes and paradoxes associated with the inter-structuring of people and socio-cultural institutions. To demonstrate this, I'll take a few examples from literary, mythological and scientific works. They will enable us to evoke the primary dynamic, the archaeology of the person.

Although classical sociology was not always oblivious or indifferent to the embodied dimensions of social relations, contemporary sociology has developed new perspectives and frameworks for understanding the body as a social and cultural construct and fundamental element in material and symbolic processes of power and conviviality. What do contemporary sociological approaches contribute to our understanding of corporeality and embodiment? What kind of changes does this represent in relation to classical perspectives? How do different theoretical approaches connect to contemporary interests and empirical research? The present article attempts to answer these questions, looking at the development and diversification of sociological approaches to the body, from Elias and Bourdieu to contemporary feminist, Foucauldian post-structuralism and queer theories. The authors highlight current research that is intersectional, international and path-breaking. They also pay particular attention to connections between the social, cultural and the political, as expressed in and through bodies, and point to the unresolved nature of the relationship between narrative, discourse and the materiality of the body.

2000

The Unthinkable Body: Challenges of Embodiment in Religion, Politics, and Ethics, 2024

This chapter traces the notion of the flesh and materiality as it appears in French phenomenology after Husserl, by reviewing the three key contributors to the phenomenology of the body in the twentieth century: Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas. It asks the question whether through the concept of ‘flesh’ (Leib) the body in its raw materiality has come to be eclipsed? The clear egoism of the Husserl of Ideas II was not able to vindicate the elaborate demarcation of kinaesthetic sensations which make up the Leibkörper dynamic. The Ego-like character of the Body is merely incidental to an overwhelming sense of property granted to it by the Ego proper. Critical of this structure, the French thinkers would attempt to re-centre the- body-I-am as opposed to the body-I-have. The chapter demonstrates something of an over-compensation, whereby Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, each in their own way ontologize the ‘lived-body’ in phenomenology. In the discussion with Merleau-Ponty and Levinas in particular, however, it is argued that there is an ambivalence between the flesh and materiality, one which allows for a greater recognition of the organic and elemental conditions of material life which precede the lived-body understood as flesh. Thus, contrary to charges that phenomenology’s concept of the flesh incorporates the body as an organ of perception at the expense of the dynamism of organic viscerality, the shadow of the body in phenomenology is always cast, felt in its material depths just as it is hidden

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2019

Due to the progress made in medicine, chemistry, pharmacology, cosmetology and technological sciences in the 20 th century, the attitude towards the human body and its perception have changed, which has led to new attributes of the 'body' concept in the modern worldview. Semantic, semanticcognitive and cognitive methods are used to identify the interpretive (evaluative and pragmatic) attributes of the 'modern body' concept and describe the interpretation field of this concept as part of the Western scientific corporeal discourse encapsulated in David Le Breton's monograph 'L'adieu au corps'. The analysis of the markers representing the interpretive attributes reveals the tendency towards the disappearance of the body, contraposing the body against the 'I', as well as generally negative attitudes towards the body. The body and the 'I' are presented as being separate, rather than united. New body practices and body techniques serve the purpose of changing the body in order to increase personal confidence and reinforce the individual's identity.

Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter, 2023

Tracing the thematization of culture and the body across modern, postmodern, and neo-modern sociological thought, this chapter explores the possibility of developing a meaning-centered, strong cultural sociology of the body and embodiment, one that approaches body and embodiment as constituting a uniquely hermeneutic situation—a fusion of subject and object, ideality and materiality—structured by cultural codes and dependent upon interpretation for getting itself out into the social world. The development of a Strong Program cultural sociological perspective on the body is, author Anne Marie Champagne argues, uniquely suited to ferreting out and reconstructing the personal and collective representations, senses and sensibilities, and myths and motifs through which the physical body comes to embody self, society, and world. **** NOTE: This is a post-peer review, pre-edited version of a chapter published in Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter (Bristol University Press, 2023), edited by Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman. It differs from the definitive publisher-authenticated version cited below. Definitive publisher version: Champagne, A. M. (2023). "1: Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body and Embodiment". In Interpreting the Body. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. Retrieved Mar 17, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529211580.ch001

Bodies and Culture is a collection of contemporary interdisciplinary research on bodies from emerging scholars in the humanities and social sciences disciplines that addresses issues relating to a range of historical and contemporary contexts, theories, and methods. Examining the diversity and capabilities of bodies, this volume focuses on the role of culture in shaping forms and conceptions of the corporeal. In particular, these essays interrogate the role of the body in articulating and reinforcing social differences, especially the effects of racist, colonialist, and other hegemonic ideologies on the agency and diversity of bodies. Bodies and Culture also considers the place of the body in forming identities, images, and narratives of individuals, and the practices of modifying bodies and social roles through physical activities from exercise to artistic performance. This collection will appeal to scholars in a wide range of areas, including literature, anthropology, sociology, art history, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and fat studies.