From: malcolmt-AT-eznet.ca
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 23:02:00 +0000
Subject: re: the body - thanks folks!


Hi everybody.

Thanks for all your responses. I'm enjoying my correspondences with 
people. One question in addition:

Does anyone know much about Wilson Harris' ideas on the body? I'm 
really interested in his ideas about "fossils" and the body as a 
container of the past, of history, etc. This at least reminds me of 
the passage in "Nietzsche, Geneology, History" where Foucault says:

"Descent attaches itself to the body. It inscribes itself in the 
nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it 
appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated 
and prostrate body [but also, I think, in the healthy body]. . . The 
body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to 
desires, failings and errors. These elements may join in a body where 
they achieve a sudden expression, but as often, their encounter is an 
engagement in which they efface each other, where the body becomes 
the pretext of their insurmountable conflict. The body is the 
inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by 
ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a 
substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration."

I wonder if there may not be confluences between this view and those 
of various post-colonial writers, e.g. Harris, George Lamming (in 
_Natives of My Person_. Or am I totally off the mark here?

Thanks in advance,

malcolm
*************************************************
When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite
possible that the proletariat will exert towards
the classes over which it has triumphed a violent,
dictatorial, even bloody power. I can't see what
objection one could make to this.

                             - Foucault
*************************************************


     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---