Impudent Flesh: Thinking Bodies & Material Life
Description
“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.
Art and literature have often taken the opposite course, turning to the body in all of its excess, messiness, and states of decay and transformation. No longer subordinated to perception, the body becomes a marked surface, a palimpsest for inscription. Attuned to Nietzsche, Foucault reframes the body as the site where history is etched and produced, describing it as “the inscribed surface of events, the locus of a dissociated self,” noting that “nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition” or recognition of others. This reveals an unstable materiality, always in process, neither subject nor object, immersed in social forces and historical change. Without a fixed form, the body is then never whole, nor can it ever simply coincide with itself, which is perhaps the very reason it remains a target for shaping and discipline.
This seminar aims to consider the material body from within this philosophical-literary nexus as a primary site of political, social, literary, or philosophical inscription. Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Historical/philosophical conceptions of embodiment
- The body in/of Literature
- Biopower and the body politic
- Body and temporality
- Body and capitalist (re)production
- Prosthesis and posthumanism
- Spectrality and the body
- Animality
- Illness and the body in medicine / anti-bodies / auto-immunity
- Dysphoria
- Transgenderism / transsexuality
- Artistic depictions of the body
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Britt Zeldenrust is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. They completed an M.A. in Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo, where their thesis examined the role of mourning in Hegel’s philosophy. Their research engages film studies, postdramatic theater, and Continental philosophy, with a focus on the implications of time and finitude developed by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida.
Speaker Bio
Nia Daskalova is a second year student in the Cultural Analysis Research Master's programme at the University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on examining how narratives in literature and film use horror elements to explore configurations of gender, queerness and more generally (re)negotiate the borders of the body. She is a part of the editorial board at Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Debashrita Dey is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, India. Her research interests encompass Feminist Ageing Studies, Health Humanities, and Care Narratives. Her work has been published in journals, including the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, South Asian Popular Culture and the International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare, among others.
Speaker Bio
Diego Cepeda is a Graduate Student of Romance Studies in Cornell University. He has worked as an editor in Ediciones Vestigio, a Colombian press focused on weird and experimental fiction, and as a translator of contemporary Portuguese and English fiction. His current work mostly explores theory-fiction and weird fiction, how these genres can create new conceptions of humanity and the way writers relate to their social and political contexts.
Papers
Speaker Bio
David Bordelon is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He previously completed at Master's degree at he EHESS in Paris.
Speaker Bio
Syeda Nadia Hasan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at East West University, Bangladesh. She has a PhD in English Literature from The University of Texas at Dallas. Her areas of specialization are 21st-century British and Anglophone literature. She is interested in examining the relationship between politics and literature.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Priyanka Tripathi is an Associate Professor of English and former Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Patna (India). She has been awarded the prestigious Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellowship (2024-25) at the School of History, University of Leeds. She was also awarded the IPD Visiting Research Fellowship (2022-23) at IASH, University of Edinburgh.