Abstract
This chapter proposes that imagining the social world as a body makes it possible to reimagine the relationships between the human body and the social world. It reveals the metaphor of the ‘social body’ that Foucault draws upon repeatedly in Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s Panopticon provides an image of the social body as incorporating human bodies, then forcing them to produce. There is another, less obvious assumption at work in Foucault’s account, which is that the human body, unchecked, is dangerous to the social body. This chapter introduces the idea that what is dangerous might also be understood as potentially transformative.
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References
Foucault, M. (1986). Disciplinary power and subjection. In S. Lukes (Ed.), Power (pp. 229–242). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (trans: Sheridan, A.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (2000). The subject and power. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984 (pp. 326–348). London: Penguin.
Irigaray, L. (1985). This sex which is not one. (trans: Porter, C.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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Clark, J. (2016). The Social Body. In: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59843-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59843-1_6
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