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Abstract: "Is the body a (sexed) thing? Freedom within New Materialist Concepts. Perspectives on Soma Studies"

Bettina Wuttig (Erziehungswissenschaft, PUM)

Within new materialist approaches on subjectivity as introduced by the philosophers Monique Wittig, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and (within certain limitations) Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, freedom is - however not always explicitly - linked to the possibility of the forces of life and freedom from identity constraint. Accordingly a feminist approach on freedom might encompass a however utopian (Wittig) or heterotopian (Foucault) possibility of a body (experience) that moves somehow outside the range of gender binaries.

Moreover Freedom might be read as an ever-new attempt to transcended dualist options, by connecting to a somatic or molecular (Deleuze) dimension, imbedded in an inquiry for of a pure (society-neutral) incoherent body - that is not yet a coherent  ‘I’ - but a multiplicity. Especially in Nietzsche’s attempt the willful forces of life seem to represent freedom, whereas constraint encompasses the forceful formation of an individual pivoted with the moral values of social order.

The (new) materialist philosophies subsequently seem to follow a neocartesian or post cartesanian approach, proposing alike in Descartes’s work metaphysics of a somatic dimension, which is nearly placed into the position of a subject itself. In this respect affects, cognitions, moral values constituting the self-determined subject, seem to be only arbitrarily linked to a vulnerable and willfull somatic dimension. Especially Descartes’s medical philosophy points to a disclosure of biologist positivism as modes of ascriptions to and inscriptions into the flesh, (a train of thought that might be applied to a non-mainstream reading of neurophysics as well).

The endeavor of this paper is to introduce into a somatic concept of subjectivation and desubjectivation, referring to the materialist philosophers named above as well as to René Descartes’s writing “Passions of the Soul”. Although the materialist philosophies follow a different aim than Descartes’s medical approaches, both scopes might transmit an understanding of how freedom is possibly linked to a somatic dimension not yet interpreted, not yet inscribed by the speeches and practices of patriarchal and colonial societal life. Might one way of reading feminism lie in an inquiry for a horizon of the ever transforming forces of life?