CSLC 288 No-Body, Some-Body, Every-Body: The Poetics of the Flesh, from Plato to Jean-Luc Nancy
In the 6th century BCE, certain Greek thinkers (who have since come to be known as "philosophers") put in motion a conceptual distinction decisive for the cultural and intellectual history of the West: the division of the soul (psyche) from the body (soma), and more generally, from the "flesh" (sarx). By the 4th century BCE, Plato seems to have concluded that philosophy must eschew any interest in the flesh, inasmuch as flesh (whatever it may be) cannot yield to precise, philosophical investigation. Perhaps even more crucially, Plato stipulated that flesh cannot and should not be the basis of a politics, as it is only philosophical insight, in its disciplined refusal of the lure of the flesh, that could serve as the ground of genuine political communion. From here it was but a short step to conclude that poetry (and of course, "art in general"), entangled as it was with the body, could have little meaning or import for the practice of either politics or philosophy.
Influential as these weighty pronouncements have been on the development of Western thought, resistance to them, it should be noted, was almost immediate--beginning perhaps with the work of Plato himself! In this course, we shall examine the ways in which literature and art, as a "poetics of the flesh," offers us a practice as rigorous, and productive, as any philosophy focused on abstract forms. We shall then consider what such a poetics of the flesh might be able to offer philosophy itself as an intellectual discipline. Finally, we shall engage with recent theories concerning the way in which authentic political community might rest not on the eschewal of the flesh, but on its deliberate and thoughtful "incorporation" (pun intended).
The first half of the class will focus on older material (certain Ancient Greek and Roman poets, Plato, Aristotle, the Old and New Testament, as well as some medieval writers and thinkers); the second half of the class, however, will turn to the work of more recent poets and theorists of the flesh, with a particular emphasis on the investigations of Jean-Luc Nancy into the significance of the arts for what he calls the "sense of sense."