bodyThinkers from diverse fields have offered their insights into the human
body. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for instance, dis-
cusses human bodies as organisms capable of perception. According to
Merleau-Ponty, the human body and the perceived world form a single
system of intentional relations that form correlations, implying that to
experience the body is to perceive the world and vice versa, rendering the
body and the world into an inseparable, internal relation. Mary Douglas,
a British anthropologist, views the body as a metaphor for reality and a
symbolic system depicting society. Michel Foucault, a French poststruc-
tural thinker, concentrates his focus on the body as a product of a rela-
tionship between power and knowledge. The philosophers George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out the role that the body plays within
mental conceptualization, which is only possible through the body.
Postmodern thinkers present a different slant on the body. Jacques
Derrida claims that the body is not one’s own because one’s relationship
to one’s body does not mean that a person is the body or that he/she pos-
sess it in any true sense. A person’s body is more akin to a deprivation
because their body is not merely something that they do not have, but it
is actually something that has been stolen from that person by the other.
In contrast to Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas conceives of the lived body as
a crossroad of physical forces.
Likewise, the postmodern philosophical team of Deleuze and Guattari
view the body as a complex interplay of social and symbolic forces,
which excludes its being a substance, an essence, a medium, or a thing,
suggesting that the body is involved in a multiplicity of elements within
a number of sign systems. Moreover, all bodies are causes in the sense of
being causes in relation to each other and for each other, although the
relationship between them is not be construed as a cause and effect rela-
tion. Invoking French artist Antonin Artaud’s concept of a body without
organs, Deleuze and Guattari want to demonstrate its relationship with
the constant flows or particles of foreign bodies. The body without organs
lacks depth or internal organization, and is more akin to a flow of forces
on a surface of intensities. The egg-like appearance and smooth surface
of the body without organs represents its exterior prior to being stratified,
organized, regulated, and hierarchized by being inscribed by such items
as race, culture, and deities. Standing against organization, regulation,
and the tendency to hierarchize it, the body without organs forms a
boundary or limit that resists such negative tendencies.
Prior to these Western thinkers, the Indian religious thinker Rāmānuja
defines the body as a mode of the self, implying that it is dependent on
the self and cannot exist apart from that which supports it. Although
subordinate to the self, the body sustains the self and provides it with the