TheBodyPolitic:TheEmbodimentofPraxisinFoucaultandHabermas

TheBodyPolitic:TheEmbodimentofPraxisinFoucaultandHabermas

byDavidM.Levin

Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:1+2/1989,pages:112132,onwww.ceeol.com.
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THE BODY POLITIC: THE EMBODIMENT OF PRAXIS IN FOUCAULT AND HABERMAS1

David Michael Levin

Questions

As a way of understanding the workings of power, Foucault proposed that we think about practices of the self, and study the body as object and instrument of power. But the body which figures in his work is without subjectivity, without any experience of power: it cannot embody a practical subject. If the body is only an object produced by historical forces, how can it be a source of resistance? How can it embody praxis? Is there some understanding of the body which Foucault misses an understanding by which the subject is practically empowered? Habermas asserts that philosophical discourse must finally acknowledge an embodied reason, but he tells us nothing about it. What does this embodiment mean? Habermas also argues that we must end the rule of a subject-centered reason and put in its place a rationality that is intersubjective and grounded in communicative practices. How might an understanding of the embodiment of reason contribute to this project? Many philosophers are wont, even today, to refer us to a sense of justice. But what does this reference mean? And how does it or might it figure in consensusforming procedures? Do we properly understand the nature of the body this body which suddenly makes its appearance in so much of our contemporary discourse?
1. Foucault

In Power/Knowledge, Foucault asks: What mode of investment of the body is necessary and adequate for the functioning of a capitalistic society like ours?2 And he argues the position that One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs,3 noting that, while there are some very interesting things about the body in Marxs writings, Marxism considered as an historical reality has had a terrible tendency to occlude the question of the body, in favour of consciousness and ideology.4 Let us ask, he says, how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors. . .5 Foucaults question is important. So I agree that political theory must give more thought to the social body, the body of the body politic. But I want, here, to touch on some of the problems which inhere in his attempts to introduce the body into the discourse of political theory. And I want to argue that his project is

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self-defeating that it literally defeats the self unless we follow up his empirical/descriptive question, about what kind of body our current society needs, with a normative/interpretive question about what kind of society our bodies want, need and dream. However, before we can take up this second question, we shall need to move towards an understanding of the body which receives from Foucault not a trace of recognition. As we shall see, there are some tensions and contradictions in his discourse on the body, and these difficulties turn out to parallel, and in fact are correlative to, the tensions and contradictions that cause trouble for his conception of the practical subject. If we spell out the logic implicit in this conception, we find that it depends on an argument of four propositions: (i) All social interactions, all communicative relations, are reducible to relations of power, i.e., relations involving domination, (ii) The subject is not inherently intersubjective, not already oriented, from the very beginning, by any inherent sociability, (iii) Therefore, the subject must be made into a social being, and (iv) The subject can become social only through processes of socialization which are inherently impositional and oppressive. This argument has some counter-revolutionary implications, much like the implications of Freuds position in Civilization and Its Discontents, according to which the work of civilization can only be repressive. For Foucault, the subject is formed by processes of subjection: self-formation is subjectification, and subjectification is objectification, the producing of subjects as objects and instruments of power. In effect, Foucaults conception of subjectivity essentializes oppression, building it into the formation and therefore the very needs, of the subject. Moreover, Foucaults conception cuts us off from an orientation towards intersubjectivity by reference to which we might be able to take the measure of our practices and institutions, and resist their oppressiveness. The rationality of a just society depends on structures of mutual recognition and reciprocity. But the subject which figures in Foucaults discourse has not yet entirely twisted free of the Cartesian metaphysics: denied, as it is, an inherent (experience of ) intersubjectivity, this subject cannot rely on the sociability, the interactional nature, of its own needs and predispositions to make a critical distinction between reason and domination in the processes of society. Thus, for example, although capitalism has failed, to some extent, to create and protect structures of mutual recognition and reciprocity, there is a critique of civil society and the state, and consequently a certain resistance, which the subject, as Foucault conceives it, cannot initiate. If the intersubjectivity of the subject is an order which calls for, and orders, a society in which there are institutionally guaranteed structures of mutual recognition and reciprocity that respect (the needs of ) this intersubjectivity and enable it to develop further, then a critique of the capitalist organization of state and civil society, based on principles of communicative rationality, will need to ground its appeal to such principles in the intersubjective nature of the subject. Now, when we examine how Foucault conceptualizes the nature of the body, it will not be at all surprising that he never asked the second question: What kind of society do our bodies want, need, and dream? Our reading of the texts will show that Foucaults thinking moves between two extremes, both of them, in the final analysis, untenable: one is a version of historicism; the other is a version

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of biologism. Despite their extremity, however, each of these conceptions proved to be illuminating: as Foucault deployed them, there can be no doubt that they brought to light, for political theory, matters which had not been seen before: events and processes, practices and institutions, stories and documents. Ultimately, however, it must be understood that these conceptions are not only false; they can also, in fact, be self-defeating, since, in different ways, they each make it impossible to embody a praxis that is both critical and emancipatory. The body according to historicism. According to Foucaults version of historicism, the only order in the human body is an order totally imposed by society, an order which is nothing but the accumulated historical effect of political controls. Foucault says: What I want to show is how power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth....6 Despite the phrase in depth, he tends to think of the body as nothing but a surface an inscribed surface of events, as he says elsewhere. And he therefore assigns to his genealogy the task of exposing a body totally imprinted by history and historys destruction of the body.7 According to this conception, the body is merely a surface for the inscription of social order, a material substratum for the application and imposition of power, the power in socially controlled meaning. The body is totally conditioned by its historical situation: there is no transhistorical, biologically given nature interacting with history; no nature to limit, resist, channel and mediate historical forces. This conception of the body, which posits its materiality and objectivity, certainly enabled Foucault to study the actions and effects of history: how domination and oppression actually work; how, in the most minute ways, our bodies are continually being formed, produced, reproduced and controlled by the forces of history. But this conception does not permit him to articulate any praxis of resistance to these historical processes, nor does it even permit him to speak of these processes as processes of subjugation, since this is a normative interpretation which must implicitly assume that the body is a source of values not completely conditioned by history. As Charles Taylor has noted, for Foucault, there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life. There are only different orders imposed by men on primal chaos, following their will-to-power.8 This conception of the body makes it impossible for us to empower the body with any capacity to talk back to history, drawing not only on its pain and suffering, but also on its depth of needs, desires, and utopian dreams, to call for an end to the history of domination and alienation. How could a body, its nature conceived in this way, ever talk back as womens bodies, for example, obviously have? How could our bodies ever become sources of situationally appropriate forms of resistance to oppressive regimes of power? If the human body were nothing more, nothing other, than what Foucaults historicism says it is, there would be no touchstone for resistance, no normative ground in the body of our experience for a political response to historical processes destructive to the nature of the body. In the final analysis, Foucault leaves us with no way to conceptualize a criticalemancipatory praxis coming from the experience of the oppressed body. The body that is unjustly punished, tortured, violated, brutalized, overworked and left to hunger, the body subject to oppressive power, can never become a subject capable of resisting it. This does the body an injustice, prepetuating the age-old repressions

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under which the body has suffered; and it defeats our attempts at theorizing emancipatory praxis. In Foucault, the body is important only because it is victimised; but its sufferings can never be a source of practical wisdom, a source of specific guidance, informing us about what needs to be changed, what needs to be done. To be sure, we must sharpen our alertness to the internalisation of socially imposed meanings, and we must understand that, as Marx observed, Nature as it comes into being in human history in the act of creation of human society, is the true nature of man.9 The body is always in history; biologism, the theory that biology totally determines our being, is false and self-defeating. But it does not follow from this that our bodily nature is totally determined by its social history such historicism is also false and self-defeating. Our nature, though certainly not totally predetermined biologically, and not a self-contained, rigidly fixed structure or system, is nevertheless to a large extent an unchosen and uncontrollable facticity, a limiting condition given to history. We will never encounter this biological givenness outside of or apart from history; we can never get to know this nature as it is in itself, an und fr sich.10 But we do at least know, from the fact of its acts of resistance, and its alterity, that the body can no more be totally reduced to social determination, social engineering, than it can be totally reduced to its biology. The questions we must then confront are: what is our experience of the bodys given nature, and how should this givenness be received, be taken up, by the society into which it is cast? Will the nature of our bodies, such as it is, be allowed to speak? Will our bodies be allowed to say what kind of society they want and hope for? And what, in that case, would our bodies want? For Foucault, there is no deep body. However, the concepts of a deep self , and of a body of depths, cannot be properly evaluated with regard to their critical, emanicipatory, and redemptive potential without considering their discursive contexts and how they are functioning within those contexts. Apart from context and function, these concepts are ambiguous, and their political implications undecidable. Apart from context and function, we cannot tell whether the deep self and the body of depths are concepts which refer to something authentic or whether, instead, they refer to something false the constructs and projections of an oppressive ideology. Foucaults anti-essentialism goes too far. There is a reactionary danger, as Marx understood, in the unqualified denial of the bodys transhistorical dimensionality: when the nature of the body is reduced to history, it has no escape from oppression. Conceptualizing the self and the body as deep may indeed be a way of capturing them for social domination: creating a depth of which the individual is unconscious and then filling it with a content (of meanings, motives, reasons, intentions, beliefs) that conforms to the dominant ideology and is taken, therefore, to confirm it. (Psychoanalytic explanations often function this way, reducing political policy questions, e.g., womans needs, to matters of individual psychology ).11 But conceptualizing the self and the body as deep may also be a way of recognizing an irreducible individuality and protecting self and body from social domination and totalisation. If, as Freud claimed, the ego is formed at, and as, the surface of the libidinal body,12 and if this ego is a product of socialisation, i.e., of social interaction, then conceptualising the body and the self as deep is one way of denying their reduction to a socially imposed, socially imprinted

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surface; it is one way of representing their withdrawal from, and their resistance to, a surface-being that is totally determined by the prevailing social prescriptions. Freedom must not be reduced to adaptation. Let us not forget that the human face is not a surface, but rather a depth, a dimensionality, the presence of an unrepresentable alterity and a very radical demand for recognition. The body according to biologism. The question of resistance, the question of critical-emancipatory praxis, calls for a body-subject: a subjective body capable of assuming the functions of an intelligent historical agent. However, when Foucault does not get entangled in a version of historicism, he gets caught in an equally untenable version of biologism. Biologism reduces the body to a mass of drives. This means that the body is denied any inherent order, any order of its own. Foucault cannot conceptualise a body inherently organised, already organised from the very beginning, for social interactions. And since most adult bodies obviously are interactional, are orderly, he can only suppose that interaction and order have been socially imposed. His version of historicism does not only deny the body any inherent order in general; more specifically, it also denies the body any inherently interactional order which is why that conception leads us to think that the order, the sociability, we see must have been socially imposed. Both interpretations of the body point back to Freud, who conceived the body in libidinal terms and thought that civilisation could civilise this body in only one way, namely: by repression. For Freud, the civilised ego is a projection which is cast and imposed by society, and which emerges on the surface of the libidinal body. Freud seems not to recognise the possibility that the process of socialisation could work, instead, by educing, by cultivating, by bringing forth and carrying forward, an implicate order that is always already social. There is a conception of the body which figures in the texts of Nietzsche and Freud and also in the thinking of those whom these texts have influenced: Marcuse, Lacan, Bataille, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari. According to this conception, the body is a chaos of drives. It is conceived in the image of Dionysus, a god of excess, knowing no measure: a body of self-abandonment, of intoxication and wildness. And it is this body conceived in his image and reflecting his narcissism, which Freud wanted to repress, to tame and civilise and which the others, from Nietzsche through Deleuze and Guattari, have wanted to encourage to incite, in fact, to riot. This is the body to which they turned for the energies of social revolution. But while this body may have the brute energy that is necessary to destroy the older order, an order of repression, it does not have the knowledge and wisdom not even, it must be said, the empowerments of language to construct a new order. Freedom becomes the victory of impulse over reason.13 The body these thinkers celebrate is eros without logos; a body without reason, without a sense of measure, without any order of its own. Consequently, it cannot know the difference between reason and domination; nor can it carry within it a concretely felt sense of the difference between justice and injustice. Moreover, this body is monadological, steeped in a primordial solipsism akin to madness; totally self-contained, without interaction, it neither needs nor has any mature interpersonal relationships. It is a body incapable, therefore, of ethical relationships. Without any recognition of the other as other, without any understanding of reciprocity, it cannot carry

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forward the utopian dream that, as I shall demonstrate using the hermeneutical phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, is already encoded in the flesh of every body, although encoded only in a very preliminary, rudimentary way, a way which of course needs to be carried forward: the dream, that is, of a genuinely human community, and of a body governed by the principle of justice. In Logics of Disintegration, Peter Dews observes, quite correctly, that Foucaults lack of any theory of drives or of any interest in the internal complexity of the psyche. . . is a lacuna in, not a virtue of, his work, since... he gravitates towards a position in which the very aim of political action appears to be the abrogation of reflection and the cancellation of self-consciousness. Since the autonomous subject is, for Foucault, already the product of subjection to power, the aim of political actions cannot be to enhance or expand this autonomy. . . . Foucaults position implies at the very least an extreme spontaneism. . . [and a] theoretically unelaborated notion of resistance, a corporeally grounded opposition to the power which. . . moulds human beings into self-identical subjects [and] implies a hostility to any form of conscious formulation of aims and strategic calculation.14 And he notes, that, when Foucault was asked the question, Are resistances to power, then, essentially physical in character? What about the content of struggles, the aspirations that manifest themselves in them?, Foucault was evasive.15 Dews astutely locates the problem. But he errs a surprising inconsistency in thinking that what Foucault needs is a more positive theory of the libidinal body.16 To be sure, Foucault does not have a satisfactory understanding of the libidinal body. But even if he did, he would still not be able to give an adequate account and by that I mean an empowering account of resistances to power, since this requires relating the content of struggles their bodily experienced meaning to an embodied rationality. What Foucault needs, therefore, is a phenomenological understanding of the body of experience, the body-subject or body-agent, and of its capacity to generate valid social meaning. It is self-defeating to ground opposition to power in the body, when the nature of the body is interpreted as a protean mass of unruly drives. Our phenomenological experience informs us that the body which embodies the political subject is not a chaos, but an order: in fact, a quite distinctive natural order; an order of nature which is neither totally programmed by biology nor totally formed by the internalisation of socially imposed rules. Near the end of his life, Foucault finally distanced himself from structuralism and returned to an acknowledgement of the subject. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity, he said, through refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.17 In What Is Enlightenment?, he argued that we need to think through a critical ontology of ourselves as a historical-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond.18 This ontology has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.19 Thus, the growth of autonomy finally becomes a question, for him, of the growth of capabilities.20 However, despite his familiarity with the phenomenological work of Merleau-

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Ponty, Foucault never granted the body of experience any recognition. Even when he abandoned structuralism and acknowedged the importance of the subject, he did not abandon interpretations of the body incompatible with this subjectivity. If biologism extremely subjectivizes the body and historicism objectifies it, what we need to think is a body of experience, for this alone is an interpretation which empowers the embodied subject while accommodating the partial truths in these other interpretations. Bearing in mind R. D. Laings observation, in The Politics of Experience, that if experience is destroyed, our behaviour becomes destructive,21 I want to argue against the view that what I am calling the body of experience is somehow less real than the objectivity of our collective life. Foucault neglects the practical body of our experience. During the years when his thinking was swayed by structuralism, the body that figured in his discourse was always seen from the outside: only its objectivity mattered; but when, after structuralism, he returned to the subject and proclaimed a subjective body, the body he celebrated was a Freudian body interpreted in a Nietzschean way: a body without any order of its own, a body capable of expressing only wildness, egoism and irrationality.22 Although Foucault began, as the What Is Enlightenment? paper indicates, to give some attention to the growth of capabilities, one thing that is strikingly missing from his interpretation of the body is a recognition of its competencies and capacities, and of the possibility that there could be practices of the self which would not be technologies technologising the body,23 but which instead would respect, and draw on, the nature of the bodys own resources, its own organismic values, skills and capabilities, carrying them forward; not only into further self-development and individuation, but also into constructive social action, types of praxis which would make society more consistent with, and more responsive to, the bodys inherently social, inherently utopian, constellation of needs, desires and dreams.24 Since power is experienced as oppressive when it neglects, blocks or denies the developmental needs of our bodys natural competencies and capacities, an understanding of the body that is attentive to its various capabilities can empower the body and channel its experience into critical-emancipatory praxis. Thus, for example, the more we develop our ability to listen, the more sensitive we are likely to become to the needs, concerns and interests that are of importance to people in circumstances very different from our own. Because Foucault ignored our embodied abilities, and, more generally, the practical body of experience, he missed an opportunity to relate his conception of practices of the self to processes cultivating the bodys experience and capabilities in non-coercive, non-manipulative ways.25 Thus he missed an opportunity to adduce critical-emancipatory praxis from an ideality whose normative axis is already operative (as I shall show in Part II) in the inherent order of the flesh. Our bodies carry dreams of a better social order, a more fulfilling body politic, dreams already announced through the felt needs and demands of our competencies and capacities: dreems already calling us to their vocation: for example, through the channels of our capacities and our needs for speaking and listening. Unfortunately, because of our social and cultural conditioning, we are for the most part much too deeply cut off from the nature of our own bodies to realize their inherent norms and dreams.

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Recent research in the field of child and developmental psychology now provides an abundance of compelling evidence to support the proposition that the infant is biologically endowed with a nature that is already organised by an order of its own: an order that is determinate but not fixed; interactional from the very beginning, rather than solitary and monadic; always already predisposed toward sociality, rather than instinctual aggressivity; and even already proto-moral, rather than totally wild and uncivilized.26 Summing up the current state of knowledge concerning motherinfant relationships, one researcher asserts that the early infant possesses capacities for interpersonal interactions on a level that was previously believed unattainable.27 The body in a Hobbesian state of Nature is nothing but a myth. This research is extremely significant, and its implications for our practices of child-rearing and education, for the assumptions of social theory, and for the critique of our cultural institutions are very far-reaching. In Part II of this paper, I want to examine what Merleau-Pontys phenomenology can contribute to our understanding of how reason and justice are embodied. And I want to work on the problematic Foucault articulated in his Preface to The History of Sexuality, vol. II when he wrote that he was trying to analyze the formation of a certain mode of relation to the self in the experience of the flesh. However, instead of analyzing experiences belonging to the past, I shall attempt to show how MerleauPontys phenomenology of the flesh opens up not only the possibility of an historically different ontology of ourselves and historically different self-formations, but also the possibility of a radically different framework for conceptualizing the historical subject of praxis.
2. The Corporeal Schematism: An Embodied Sense of Justice

In Body/Power, Foucault declared: I believe that the great fantasy is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. For the phenomenon of the social body is the effect, not of consensus, but of the materiality of power operating upon the very bodies of individuals.28 His position, however, confuses the is and the ought, the fact and the ideal; and it therefore reduces utopian-emancipatory possibilities to oppressive actualities. I agree that the social body is an effect of power; but I repudiate his unwillingness to think the possibility of a social body achieved by rational consensus. By rejecting this possibility, he betrays the very bodies of individuals, for they carry, as I shall now try to show, a utopian-emancipatory potential, wrought into their very flesh. Even though the word consensus comes from the senses and sensibility, Foucault would have us suppress the dreams carried in and by our bodies. Against Foucault, I want to argue (i) that the nature of the body is intersubjective, i.e., intercorporeal, (ii) that intercorporeality is inherently interactional, or social, (iii) that this interaction roots us in a dialectic of reversibility, (iv) that reversibility establishes the experiential matrix for reciprocity, and (v) that our bodies accordingly bear a utopian potential, the sense, or dream, of a collectively achieved and shared understanding, in the reciprocities of which this reversibility would be realised and fulfilled. I shall use Merleau-Pontys phenomenolgy to bring to light the bodys deeply felt sense of justice the natural, inaugural, and most radical grounding of the ideal of justice in the body of our experience.

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In an interview published in Power/Knowledge, Foucault opined that the problem is not so much that of defining a political position (which is to choose from a pre-existing set of possibilities), but to imagine and bring into being new schemas of politicization.29 I agree. But Foucault, despite his problematising of the body, failed to realise that the human body already carries within it a new schema of politicization: a schema we have continually overlooked and neglected to explore. Current research documents the fact that the infant is born with a wide range of organizational schemas previously unheard of.30 Here I shall examine the phenomenology of this schematism, adducing the formation of a sense of justice. In The Childs Relations with Others, Merleau-Ponty fleshed out in phenomenological terms the concept of a corporeal schema and considered how this schema could be elaborated through practices of the self, practices of bodily selfawareness and self-understanding: To the extent that I can elaborate and extend my corporeal schema, to the extent that I can acquire a better organised experience of my own body, to that very extent will my consciousness of my own body cease being a chaos in which I am submerged and lend itself to a transfer to others.31 In this essay, however, Merleau-Ponty was still conceptualising the body in a relatively familiar form. Not so in the papers published posthumously in The Visible and the Invisible. Here, the familiar body is deepened: my body is opened out; it becomes an elemental flesh, a being of depths. Going into these depths, Merleau-Ponty confirms experientially, i.e., phenomenologically, the recent research findings in child and developmental psychology. Moreover, he also gives experiential support to biology. Thus, for example, whereas ego psychology, by identifying, as Joel Whitebook says in Reason and Happiness, the biological sources of the ego, actually locates some of the biological roots of sociation, Merleau-Pontys phenomenological work makes explicit the experiential roots of sociation roots that may be correlated with the biological.32 In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty reflects on his sense that, as he puts it, my body ... discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other persons are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.33 This prolongation is also our openness. From the very beginning, there is a primordial sociability shaping and moving our bodies. Our bodies hold us open to others from the very beginning the prepersonal beginning of our lives. Moreover, our prolongation in the other is a relationship that is always, in principle, open to further extension. The inherent communicativeness of an elemental flesh, a flesh we share even as it keeps us apart, makes this extension possible, and indeed desirable. What socialization can do is educate draw out and develop the sociality-potential already inscribed in the flesh. In his phenomenological work, then, Merleau-Ponty directs our bodily awareness to the fact of our intercorporeality, a dimension of our embodiment governed by the intertwining of my life with the other lives, of my body with the visible things, by the intersection of my perceptual field with that of the others.34 And he helps us retrieve and redeem the sense of this experience.

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Now, the principal concept Merleau-Ponty uses to interpret the nature of the flesh, the body of depths, is reversibility. It is this reversibility of the flesh, he says, which is the ultimate truth.35 In his Working Notes, he tells us that reversibility is the idea that every perception is doubled with a counterperception. . . , is an act with two faces; [so it could almost be said that] one no longer knows who speaks and who listens.36 When I listen to myself, to my words, to the sound of my voice, I can hear others: I hear others inside my self. Conversely, when I listen to others, I can hear myself: I hear myself in, or through, the others in my world. Similarly, I can see others in myself and see myself in others. We act as mirrors for one another; we reflect one another; we resonate and echo one another. Our positions are so deeply intertwined that they tend, on a level of which we are often more or less unconscious, to transpose and reverse themselves in a surprising dialectic of reversibility. Social co-existence is a dialectic of transpositions. In the moment of self-recognition, we see and hear ourselves in a reversibility that could happen only by grace of the presence of others. Now, this phenomenon of reversibility is a fact of the utmost significance for our ethical and political life. As Dews argues, socialization depends on a mutual recognition of subjects, however distorted.37 (Of course, if there is any distortion in the mutual acknowledging, there will be a corresponding distortion in the socialization. This is a phenomenon that has been studied and confirmed in the context of parent-infant relationships. Of special importance, in this regard, is the work of Harry Sullivan, Harold Searles, Gregory Bateson, and Ronald Laing.)38 But, as Dews points out, neither Adorno nor Horkheimer, despite their sophisticated psychologies, ever articulated an adequate theoretical recognition of the process of reciprocity-formation specific to the social domain.39 And Foucault gave no recognition at all. Dews accordingly challenges the fundamental post-structuralist assumption that identity can never be anything other than the suppression of difference. . . 40 Foucaults genealogies of the self, and his studies of selfformative practices, show no recognition whatsoever of the possiblity that an identity can be developed and sustained through experiences of non-identity as in, for example, the communicative interactions characteristic of the social domain.41 Post-structuralist thinkers Lacan, Foucault, Derrida seem stubbornly and unjustifiably committed to the position that individual identity is always a reification: that it requires fixation, or absolute unchangingness, and that it can be formed, therefore, only through submission, the passive internalization of externally imposed authority. They do not see that identity can be formed through interactions of identification and differentiation.42 This, however, submits all processes of identity-formation to what Dews calls the logic of disintegration. Clearly, this is not a satisfactory conclusion to stop at, although we should appreciate the critical, negative points in the post-structuralist and Frankfurt School analyses of identityformation. Here, then, I want to argue that Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the self-other dialectic, worked out long before post-structuralism, lets us see a process of self-formation which avoids the problematic on which these other accounts are shattered. Indeed, I think we may say, with words from Habermas, that his phenomenology calls to mind a relationship between persons in which the accommodating, identifying externalization of one partner in relation to the

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model of the other does not require the sacrifice of that partners own identity, but preserves dependency and autonomy at once.43 Showing, as it does, how identities are formed through intercorporeal transpositions, Merleau-Pontys phenomenology provides a grounding in this body of our experience for Habermass contention that Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subjects; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity or recognition demands the non-identity of the one and the other: both must also maintain their difference, for to be a subject implies the claim to individuation.44 It is essential that we understand the nature of the role of the body in this social process. From his earliest work to his last, Merleau-Ponty sought to establish such an understanding. In The Indirect Language, for example, he showed that it is characteristic of cultural gestures to awaken in all others at least an echo, if not a consonance.45 We live in a social world: we inhabit this world. But the world also inhabits us. I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.46 These phenomenological observations tell us things we need to keep in mind as we think about structures of mutual recognition, the achievement of mutual understanding, the sorts of conditions that are necessary for reciprocity, and how to encourage those kinds of practices which would build both the formation of consensus and the tolerance of difference into our institutions. Foucault denounced phenomenology, accusing it of transcendental narcissism, just as, earlier, Marxists had accused it of idealism and subjectivism. These accusations are justified, when they target the work of Husserl. But Merleau-Ponty made use of phenomenology to ground his argument that, rather than being essentially self-contained and isolated from others, which is how we have always understood ourselves in the discourse of consciousness, we are, as embodied, joined inseparably, inseparably bound, to others: inherently predisposed, as bodies, to be affected by others; touched and moved by their presence. What he shows us is the fact that it is by grace of the flesh that we are gathered with others into a primordial sociability. This original state of sociability, this original position, gives us a much-needed touchstone, a normative ground, for perceiving and judging the character of our social practices and political institutions. Since our bodies are from the very beginning interactional, not monadic, but proto-social, and even protomoral, individuation requires, and is, a process of socialization. However, since our bodies are already, from their very beginning, partially autonomic, partially self-regulating, biologically organized for a certain degree and level of systemic independence, we require that processes of socialization serve the needs of individuation. And we can draw on these needs, formed in our bodies, to judge the prevailing practices and institutions of socialization and to resist or change them when they are oppressive. Thus is it important to see phenomenologically that the original position of the embodied practical subject is always already involved, involved long before linguistic consciousness, in a dialectic of transposition, and that the reflexive reversibilities of the flesh constitute a rudimentary schematism of reciprocities, relationships which are grounded in a transposition of reversible standpoints and viewpoints, and which lay the ground, however

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precariously, for subsequent discursive engagements aimed at mutual understanding. All interactions are therefore opportunities for the progressive fleshing out of the bodys originary schematism: this implicate order, this utopian hint, inherent in our initial intercorporeality, of a more developed, more civilized intercorporeality, concretely structured practices and institutions of recognition, communication and reciprocity, generated from within the shared body of social experience. In The Concept of Nature, a lecture at the Collge de France, Merleau-Ponty spoke of an ideal community of embodied subjects, an intercorporeality.47 This tantalizing vision, communicated all too briefly, needs to be thought in conjunction with something he says in The Visible and the Invisibile: We will have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth.48 When Merleau-Ponty suggested a name for this ideality, he proposed the term reversibility. Reversibility refers to our corporeal schematism, the elementary form of reciprocity our bodies already know about long before they are of an age to be tutored. In short, it refers to the fact that the body is inherently ordered for participation in structures of mutual recognition, structures that constitute the very root of our sense of justice. Since this transpositional reversibility is structured into the inherent order of the body, I think we are justified in appropriating the concept of a corporeal schematism to describe it. The infant body embeds the child in an initial community, a syncretic sociability.49 The childs body is always already endowed, always already informed, prior to its participation in the processes of socialisation, by an operative schema, a prototype, in fact, of the ideal body politic: a schema of organisimc principles woven into its tissues, its musculature, its organs and limbs of perception and action: an incarnate dream, born of the flesh. The intercorporeal schematism is initially, to be sure, only rudimentary; it needs to be developed; but it can be developed only through the processes of socialization. Its development is not automatic or inevitable. And not all processes will draw it out. Only some kinds of educational interactions (Bildungsprozesse) are sufficiently harmonious with, and sufficiently attuned to, the needs and claims of the schematism, the bodys own order, to be able to carry forward, life-affirmingly, the values and dreams that are inherent in, and constitutive of, our most universal organismic capacities. However, if we want to build a society truly organised by principles of justice, then we must avoid distorted communicative relationships,50 and we must begin to initiate children into the life of our society in ways that recognise and respect the organismic roots of an ethics of care and a politics of reciprocity and justice. The rule of justice depends on structures of reciprocity, an ethics of communicative rationality. But reciprocity, in turn, depends on the bodys experience and understanding of reversibility: the reversing of roles and points of view. John Rawls construes the sense in our sense of justice to be nothing but a cognitive disposition or endowment, a form of understanding.51 While it is of course necessary to spell out in cognitive terms what our sense of justice requires, Merleau-Ponty brings out the rootedness of justice in our innate sensibility; and opens up the possibility of grounding it in the transpositions, the communicative reversibilities, ordering the subjective body. Thanks to the work of MerleauPonty, we can find, in the experienced reversibilities of the flesh, an organismic

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basis for the principle of reciprocity. Though I have only been able, here, to articulate a few hints, we can begin to explore how reciprocity, a necessary condition of social justice, carries forward and fulfills the need which an organismic reversibility primally inaugurates and for which it demands the most vigilant, most enduring recognition. The order of the experiential body makes it innately, in Bourdieus terms, a socially informed body.52 What Bourdieu calls the habitus, namely, a principle generating and unifying all practices, the system of inseparably cognitive and evaluative structures which organizes the vision of the world in accordance with the objective structures of a determinate state of the social world,53 points back to a more originary principle, ordering the body from its very beginning. This principle is the corporeal schematism constitutive of the flesh. More so than his sociology of the habitus, however, Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of our intercorporeality empowers the embodied practical subject, redeeming its capacity to address history and make claims on society, speaking with eloquence of its deepest needs, concerns and dreams. In Culture and Domination, John Brenkman locates a point where the immanent critique of Horkheimer and Adorno gets into trouble:
Having counterposed in absolute terms a reason that serves the aims of selfpreservation and a reason that would seek the truth, and having made the former the driving force of civilization as a whole, Horkheimer and Adorno narrow the resources of social and cultural critique to the suppressed upsurge of the noninstrumentalized, resistant energies of nature (the external world, the body, the unconscious). By their own account, however, this countermovement to instrumental reason is impervious to conceptualization or discursive thought. It can expressively indict the prevailing social order, but it cannot generate categories of social analysis.54

I concur in Brenkmans assessment of the dilemma confronting Horkheimer and Adorno. But it should be clear by now, even from the phenomenology of intercorporeality we have very briefly touched on, that Brenkman himself has narrowed the resources of social and cultural critique by assuming, with them, and with Foucault, that the body is impervious to conceptualization or discursive thought, and that it can expressively indict the prevailing social order, but cannot generate categories of social analysis. Before we proceed to a consideration of Habermas I would like to review the steps we have taken in Part II, clarifying the logic of the argument and spelling out my claim that the phenomenology of embodiment presented here enables us to understand how the body can indeed perform both of the practical tasks Brenkman names. I have argued for the following propositions, (i) The human body has is an order of its own. This order, an immanent logos of the flesh, has not been recognized, (ii) This order is already geared into the mutual recognitions of social interaction: it is already pro-social: the bodys pro-social behaviour is not, and does not need to be, totally introduced by the work of society. (iii) Societys work of socialization, and its vision of moral development, should respect, and be responsive to, the primal order of sociality already inherent in the childs body, (iv) Reciprocity is a socially produced discursive order; it is also the only order we know of that adequately carries forward the reversibilities in which the bodys

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own order is initially manifest. (v) The order of the body the bodys own order needs, and orders, a just society. Only a society governed by the principles of justice, a society structured for the realization of democratic pluralism, can fulfill the diverse needs deeply implicate in the nature of our bodies. Our bodies require that, whatever their differences may be, all political systems should be at least consistent with their implicate normativity. But we have no a priori reason to suppose that there is one and only one political system which could harmoniously fulfill this order, and which would be uniquely fated or prescribed. Our biology does not, and cannot, totally determine any specific political arrangements. Nevertheless, given the fact that the order of our bodies is an order structured by reversibility, it is clear that what the body needs for its fulfillment is a social order governed, at the very least, by forms of reciprocity and an ethics of communicative rationality. (vi) There is a critical function implicit in the concept of the flesh: an implicit critique of society and its body politic. Measured against the justice in the flesh, both capitalism and the ego are questioned and indicted. The dominance of the ego, the distinctively modern form of subjectivity, is contested by the communicative infrastructures of an inherently social intercorporeality which precedes its individuated formation, while capitalism is indicted insofar as it (a) reinforces the rule of the ego, (b) perpetuates the grounds of a subject-centred reason, and (c) does not promote conditions of reciprocity which would realize in a new social order the reversibilities and transpositions the forms of mutual recognition already schematized by the flesh. Although the ego-body (the ego-centred body) has appeared in many different societies and cultures, our analysis points to the conclusion that, since the ego-centred body is split off from the reversibilities of the flesh from experiences of reversibility which lay the ground for reciprocity, to the extent that the capitalist social system privileges the ego-body of bourgeois character and promotes its rule, to that same extent capitalism can only be inimical to the experiential grounding of principles of justice. Thus, our hermeneutical phenomenology works for the cause of justice by developing our experience of the flesh and its reversals, and by contesting the historical alliance between capitalism and the ego-body. (vii) Working for social justice today calls for promoting new forms of subjectivity, as Foucault finally argued. And this means collaborating with the pro-social order of our bodies to achieve in society at large a level of moral development in which questions of social justice, and the communicative procedures that reflection on these questions require, are of paramount concern: a possibility we cannot recognize, without understanding that neither the monadic ego (in the discourse of Cartesian metaphysics) nor the disorganized body of drives (in the discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis) should continue to represent for us the distinctive social character of the human self.51 (viii) In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty argued that, To understand and judge a society, one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built.56 I think that Merleau-Ponty has contributed significantly to this very project, casting a penetrating light on the depths and dimensions of this human bond, and letting it be seen and recognized as a justice in the flesh. Justice is not just an abstract ideal, a principle conceived by the mind it is also a critical measure rooted in the body. By virtue of the body, we carry within us

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a rudimentary, preconceptually formed sense of justice.57 This experiential ground of justice cannot be recognized, however, unless we rescue the body from reification: social practices and cultural discourses that continue to objectify the body and deny it the power to mean, to speak, to reason, to generate new categories of social analysis. The body of experience is the practical subject of this power.
3. Habermas

Recently, taking up the feminist/postmodernist critique of Enlightenment Reason that began with the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas has argued that,
Instead of following Nietzsches path of a totalising and self-referential critique of reason, . . . it is more promising to seek this end through the analysis of the already operative potential for rationality contained in the everyday practices of communication. Here the validity dimensions of prepositional truth, normative rightness, and subjective truthfulness, or authenticity, are intertwined with one another. From this network of a bodily and interactively shaped, historically situated reason, our philosophical tradition selected out only the single thread of prepositional truth and theoretical reason and styled it into the monopoly of humanity. (Questions and Counterquestions)58

Habermass recognition of the body of reason, and his support for its speech in the discourse of politics, are significant provocations. Yet Habermass recent work does very little to flesh out the revolutionary implications of this critical interpretation. Marcuse is the only thinker associated with the Frankfurt School and its critical theory movement who has attempted to derive from the body a critical, utopian-emancipatory praxis of reason. Unfortunately, he was not sufficiently critical of the Freudian theory of drives, and this prevented him from working out an adequately critical, adequately effective concept and praxis of reason. Marcuses new rationality is embodied, but its embodiment is understood in a way that makes it only expressive, only aesthetic: Marcuse ignored the ethical and communicative functions of reason and failed to recognise that it is the body of experience which carries these functions. In Moral Development and Ego Identity, Habermas contends that individuation requires not only cognitive mastery of general levels of communication, but also the ability to give ones own needs their due in these communicative structures; us long as the ego is cut off from its internal nature and disavows the dependency on needs that still await suitable interpretations, freedom, no matter how much it is guided by principles, remains in truth unfree in relation to existing systems of norms.59 I wholeheartedly agree. But we must not forget that the concept of an internal nature lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations and that the hegemony of some of these interpretations has had the ideological effect of cutting us off even more deeply from our internal nature, e. g., by concealing and denying the alienation. It is not only our needs which require suitable interpretation; the concept of an internal nature, and the fact of our historical alienation from this nature, also need satisfactory interpretation. Now, Habermas has recently put need-interpretation on the agenda for philosophical and political debate. Commendable as this is, it must be pointed

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out that he ignores the body of felt experience: an intelligent body capable of selfreflection, a body capable of articulating its motives and reasons for action. But, to ignore the body is to neglect the roots of need-interpretation; thus it is, in effect, to perpetuate our alienation from internal nature, a body of needs which must first be recognised, before it can be redeemed through processes of interpretation and communication. So long as the body of needs is ignored, how can internal nature be moved into a utopian perspective? Before its contents, our needs and affects, become communicatively accessible (to quote from Seyla Benhabibs Critique, Norm and Utopia), this body needs to be recognised and its authority respected.60 What does this entail? Developing some thoughts argued by Habermas, Benhabib suggests that this means we must get in touch with those sedimented and frozen images of the good and happiness in the light of which we formulate needs and motives,61 and that our reflexive questioning in this regard must be accompanied by an ability to articulate our needs linguistically, i.e., by an ability to communicate with others about them.62 And yet, at the same time that she supports a discourse of need-interpretation based on the retrieval of utopian images sedimented in our internal nature, Benhabib gives an account which cuts us off from the body of experience, the body of needs, arguing for an analysis which implicitly disembodies the images. Thus, for example, in The Utopian Dimension in Communicative Ethics, she writes: In the semantic heritage of a cultural tradition are contained the images and anticipations of a fulfilled life-history and of a collective life-form in which justice does not exclude solidarity, and freedom is not realized at the expense of happiness.63 Now, I have no quarrel at all with her about the semantic heritage of our cultural tradition. But I must dispute what seems to be an excessive linguistification: the implication that these utopian images and anticipations are contained, first and foremost, or only, in our semantic heritage. I would argue, rather, that they are carried, first and foremost, by the body of experience. By cutting us off from this body, the analysis she proposes does not enable us to make political use of the bodys inwrought wisdom. This wisdom can articulate itself. If we know how to work with the body of experience, we can bring this wisdom into language and into the realm of public discourse.64 Such body-work is the practice of the self I am exploring in this paper. Returning to our reflections on the schematism of intercorporeality to which I gave articulation in working out Merleau-Pontys concept of the flesh, I want to argue that, in the dimension from which we are cut off, there are more than utopian images and anticipations to be awakened: there is also an ideal normativity inherent in the intersubectivity of the flesh; and, correlatively, an experiential basis for insisting on principles which would lead to the formation of a new body politic, a new political order, since there are principles always already schematised by, and in, the body: principles initially inscribed, inscribed in the auditory flesh, for example, as a corporeal schema implicitly orchestrating the conduct of our lives despite a form of society which even today suppresses and distorts its functioning. If we want to bring about the social production and transmission of a more rational, more reciprocity-governed process of consensus-formation, then it seems to me that we need to give more thought to the body of depths, the body whose schematism of reversibility constitutes a bodily felt need for recognition and

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development within communicative structures that will promote the bodys fulfillment in procedures of reciprocity at the same time that they will themselves benefit from the contributions of a bodily-grounded reciprocity. Just as, for Habermas, the ideal speech situation, the ideal condition for reaching a rational, non-coercive consensus, is necessarily implied in the competency-structure already inherent in language itself, so the reciprocity that is necessary in the constitution of a rational and just social order is an organsmic fulfillment already implied in the structural transpositions and reversibilities that already organise and predispose the flesh. Merleau-Pontys late work in the phenomenology of perception, detailing in experientially accessible terms the intertwinings, transpositions, and reversibilities always already constitutive of looking and listening, suggests the proposition that there is a bodily grounded need for a society procedurally organised to be in consonance with the body politic that is already deeply schematised by the intercorporeality informing the visionary and auditory body-self. Empirical research, tracking the mutual reflecting in the interactions of gazes, and registering the responsive resonances and motor echoes that occur in normal listening, now confirms his phenomenology in behavioural terms. Merleau-Pontys phenomenology provides an experiential grounding for Habermass analysis, bringing out a reciprocity-structure always implicit in the speech situation as we experience it. He shows how the acquisition of language is itself a phenomenon of identification. To learn to speak is to learn to play a series, of roles, to assume a series of conducts or linguistic gestures.65 Thus, in the very process of learning to speak, we learn the reversibility of positions and roles that is later necessary for the practice of reciprocity. Moreover, his contributions to the phenomenology of listening bring out the fact that listening, too, teaches us reversibility: to listen to another is to learn what the world is like from a position that is not ones own; to listen is to reverse position, role, and experience. To refuse this reversibility is to refuse to listen, to turn a deaf ear. I think it can be demonstrated that, just as our speaking with others is implicitly governed by certain norms, constitutive of what Habermas calls the ideal speech situation, so too is our listening. Listening, like speech, is not only a bioiogical endowment, but also a capacity, a competence, an acquired skill; and as such, it too can be developed. If listening is a capacity, then there is a potential which can be either neglected or realised, either left to nature and circumstance or developed and fulfilled. And if we need to realise and fulfill this potential, we need to assume that there must be norms and standards that implicitly govern our listening.66 Although Habermas can see a significant correlation between ego identity and moral development, he does not consider the fact that listening is a developmental capacity, and that its developmental stages are normatively related to our self-development as moral agents. Note that the word obedience means listening from below. Now if, as Erikson and Kohlberg have demonstrated, obedience is characteristic of a very early stage of moral development, should we not suppose that the correlation continues, and that, as obedience gives way to an ethics of autonomy, responsibility and care, the capacity for listening would not only undergo corresponding developmental changes, but would also, by virtue of these very changes, facilitate the further development of moral character as

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a whole? This is what I mean when I say that Habermas ignores our embodiment. His neglect is, however, unfortunate, because it means that he misses the normative, moral-political groundwork of perceptual processes: processes schematizing the ideal reciprocity-relations in which, and as which, they would be genuinely fulfilled. One way for us, both as individuals and as society, to approximate the conditions of the ideal speech situation would be to work on developing our capacity for listening. In conclusion, let me suggest that the task of overcoming all the metaphysical abstractions surrounding the logos,67 and the task of experientially grounding a regulative ideal of the body politic in the inherent need-and-dream-order which is the logos of the human body, are tasks that still lie very much before us. I have only sketched their outlines in the briefest way. We need a utopian-emancipatory discourse on the body no less than we need the critical-analytic discourse that Foucault set in motion.68 And this means that we need to understand the nature of our bodies, asking ourselves what this nature must be if it makes sense to call, as Habermas does, for a communicative reason embodied in intersubjective life-contexts. Habermass paradigm of mutual understanding, that is, of the intersubjective relationship between individuals who are socialized through communication and reciprocally recognize one another, will remain forever an abstraction unless it can be drawn from the inherently interactional nature of our bodies and institutionalized in fulfillment of our bodies intersubjectivity, a potential constitutive of our needs and predispositions as embodied practical subjects.69
NOTES
1. This is a revised version of the paper I read March 10, 1988 in San Francisco, at a symposium of the Western Political Science Association. That paper and this revision are greatly abbreviated versions of Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book, The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change, and the Closure of Metaphysics (London, New York: Routledge, Chapman, & Hall, 1989). I am grateful to my colleague, Thomas McCarthy, who read this chapter and gave me his comments, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement. I also want to thank Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Gendlin, Joel Kovel, and Roger Levin for their participation in the critical readings that preceded the present text. 2. Michel Foucault, Body/Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York, 1980), pp. 58-59. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 97. 6. Ibid., p. 186. 7. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Memory, Countermemory, Practice (Ithaca, 1977), p. 48. For an argument against Foucault on this point, see Eugene Gendlin, A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism: The Significance of the Awareness Movement, in David M. Levin (ed.), Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression (New York, 1987). 8. Charles Taylor, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, in David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (London and New York, 1986), p. 93. For a lucid and insightful discussion of matters related to these criticisms of Foucault, see Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London, 1987), esp. pp. 109-170. Adorno fights the prioritizing of a libidinal unconscious, arguing that this does not in fact enable the self to resist oppression and achieve its dream of freedom, but rather, on the contrary, denies it the possibility of rational motivation, and ultimately, therefore, all capacity for praxis. I agree. So I hope it is clear that my defense of the bodys experience is likewise a repudiation of the prioritizing and defense of the libidinal unconscious.

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9. See Karl Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, in Quinton Hoare (ed.), The Early Writings of Karl Marx (New York, 1975), 335. 10. See Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst (New York, 1981), esp. pp. 63-64, 233, 258. Kovel argues persuasively for the bodys transhistoricity, and he does so without ever removing the body from the forces of history. Also see Gad Horowitz, The Foucaultian Impasse: No Sex, No Self, No Revolution, Political Theory, vol. 15, no 1. (February, 1987), pp. 61-80. 11. See Nancy Fraser, Social Movements vs. Disciplinary Bureaucracies: The Discourses of Social Needs, CHS Occasional Papers, no. 8 (Minneapolis: Center for Humanistic Studies, University of Minnesota), p. 23. I want to signal an important point of difference between Fraser and myself: Fraser simply rejects the deep self and a body of depths. 12. See Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York, 1960), p. 16. 13. See Dews, op. cit, p. 142: Adorno considers [the freedom of ] post-liberal capitalism to be characterized by a progressive liquidation of the distinction between the ego and the unconscious in a narcissistic personality type. 14. Ibid., p. 164. Also see pp. 188-189. 15. Ibid., Also see Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 164. 16. Dews, op. cit., p. 166. 17. Foucault, The Subject and Power, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), p. 216, 18. Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), p. 47. 19. Ibid., p. 50. 20. Ibid., p. 48. 21. Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York, 1967), p. 28. 22. See Dews, op. cit., pp. 109-170. 23. See Foucault, The Subject and Power, op. cit., p. 208; On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, in Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, pp. 351-362; and Technologies of the Self, in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrik Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self (Amherst, 1988), p. 18. Also see Patrick Huttons chapter, Foucault, Freud, and the Technologies of the Self, op, cit., pp. 127-140. 24. See Dews, op. cit., pp. 156-162. 25. See Eugene Gendlin, Focusing (New York, 1981) for a theoretical and practical understanding of the bodys immanent organization of norms and values. Also see his paper, Experiential Phenomenology, in M. Natanson (ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences (Evanston, 1973). 26. See A. N. Meltzoff and M. K. Moore, Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates, Science, vol. 98 (1977); Jerome Kagan, The Nature of the Child (New York, 1984); Daniel Bar-tal, Prosocial Behavior, Theory and Research (New York, 1976); T. B. Brazelton, Early Parent-Infant Reciprocity, Progress in Reproductive Medicine, vol. 2 (1985); Z. F. Boukydis, A Theory of Empathic Relations between Parents and Infants, The Focusing Folio, vol. 4, no. 1 (1985); Michael Coyle, An Experiential Perspective on the Mother-Infant Relation. The Focusing Folio, vol.6, no. 1 (1987), Nancy Eisenberg, The Development of Prosocial Behavior (New York, 1982); M. L. Hoffman, Is Altruism Part of Nature?, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 3 (1981); Paul Mussen, Nancy Eisenberg, The Roots of Caring, Sharing and Helping (New York, 1977); P. Stratton (ed.), The Psychobiology of the Human Newborn (New York, 1982); and Marion Yarrow, The Emergence and Founding of Pro-social Behaviors in Young Children, in R. Smart (ed.), Readings in Child Development and Relationships (New York, 1977). 27. Michael Coyle, An Experiential Perspective on the Mother-Infant Relationship, The Focusing Folio, vol. 6, no. 1 (1987), p. 1. 28. Foucault, Body/Power, in Power/Knowledge, p. 55. 29. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 190. 30. Coyle, op. cit., p. 5. 31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Childs Relations with Others, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, 1964), p. 118. For extensive empirical research on the body image, see Seymour Fisher, Body Experience in Fantasy and Behavior (New York, 1970).

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32. Joel Whitebook, Reason and Happiness, in Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge and London, 1985), p. 144. 33. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York and London, 1962), p. 354. 34. Merleau-Ponty, Reflection and Interrogation, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, 1968), p. 49 35. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 85, and The Visible and the invisible, p. 264. 36. Ibid. 37. Dews, op. cit., p. 198. 38. See H. S. Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York, 1953); Harold Searles, Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects (New York, 1965); and R. D. Laing, Sanity, Madness, and the Family (London, 1964). 39. See Dews, op. cit., pp. 197-199. 40. Ibid., p. 170. 41. Ibid., p. 231. 42. Ibid., p. 228. 43. Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, 1987) p. 68. 44. Habermas, Sprachspiel, Intention und Bedeutung, in R. W. Wiggershaus (ed.), Sprachanalyse und Soziologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), p. 334. 45. Merleau-Ponty, The Indirect Language, The Prose of the World (Evanston, 1973), p. 94. 46. Merleau-Ponty, The Childs Relations with Others, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, 1964), p. 146. 47. Merleau-Ponty, The Concept of Nature, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France (Evanston, 1970), p. 82. 48. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 152. 49. See Merleau-Ponty, The Childs Relations with Others, op. cit., pp. 119-120, 135. 50. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 306. 51. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, 1971). 52. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), p. 124. 53. Ibid. 54. John Brenkman, Culture and Domination (Ithaca, 1987), p. 16. Italics added. 55. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Anne Lovell (eds.), Psychiatry Inside Out (New York, 1987), pp. xiii-xiv. Franca Basaglia asks: What in fact is the body of the [psychiatric] innate if it is not the body of internment? Where can one trace, in this total invasion and expropriation by the [psychiatric] institution, the distance between the I and the self , the interval between the I and the body necessary for the subject, if these bodies are possessed by the institution, if they are the very body of the institution? How and where can one enable the subject to emerge in that humiliated humanity, in those tortured bodies, in those truncated lives? In Foucaults discourse on the body, there is no conceptual space for raising and exploring such questions, since, for Foucault, our social institutions totally produce and possess all bodies. 56. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (Boston, 1969), p. xiv. 57. See Tom R. Tyler, Justice, Self-interest, and the legitimacy of Legal and Political Authority, in Jane Mansbridge (ed.) Beyond Self-interest to be published by The University of Chicago Press: While we now have evidence that there is a substantial consensus among Americans about what constitutes a fair procedure, we do not yet understand the nature of the socialization process which presumably underlies such effects. It is necessary for this socialization process to recognise, respect, and cultivate the bodys inherent sense of justice, which makes an essential contribution to the formation of such consensus. 58. Habermas, Questions and Counterquestions, in Richard Bernstein (ed.) Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge and London, 1985), pp. 196-197. Italics added. 59. Habermas, Moral Development and Ego Identity, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston, 1979), p. 78. 60. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia (New York, 1986), p. 336. 61. Ibid., p. 333. 62. Ibid.

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63. Benhabib, The Utopian Dimension in Communicative Ethics, New German Critique, no. 35 (Spring/Summer, 1985), p. 83. 64. See Eugene Gendlin, Focusing (New York, 1981) and A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism: The Significance of the Awareness Movement, in D. M. Levin (ed., Pathologies of the Modern Self (New York, 1987). 65. Merleau-Ponty, The Childs Relations with Others, op. cit., p. 109. 66. See David M. Levin, The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change, and the Closure of Metaphysics, to be published in 1989 by Routledge, Chapman, and Hall. Also set D. M. Levin The Opening Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (London and New York, 1988). 67. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 311. 68. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1955). 69. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 40. 70. Ibid., p. 310.