Customer Reviews

Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal

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Brilliant critical poststructuralist feminist text.

As a former anthropologist Vicky Kirby is obsessed with materiality and undertakes a incredible task of redefining what that might mean in current postructuralist (western) thought.

First chapter surveys the problematic identity of the famous semiotic 'sign' of linguistics. She utilises the writings of Jaques Derrida extensively (his idea of differance and writing in the general sense), but makes crucial, subtle, fundamental differences.

She does not entirely conflate the binaries, as many poststructuralist theorist presume to do. Instead she reworks the bar of duality into a hologramatic partitioning - infinite internal devisions which leave neither materiality nor ideality intact.

In the 2nd + 3rd chapters she critiques the work of Drucilla Cornell, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway + others. She demonstrate their inadvertant reinscription of the binaries they seek to conflate.

Final chapters look at materiality and corporeality in cyberspace. She critisises prevailing logocentric view on technology and the body.

Essential reading for students, academics looking for ways out of relativist poststructural positions. Serves as grounding for a cultural materialist perspective(?).

Very difficult reading, though perhaps necessarily so. Presumes some knowledge of Ferdinand D. Saussures 'A Course in General Linguistics' and postructuralist readings of this eg. Jaques Derrida's 'Of Gramatology.'

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This is a valuable and interesting book for anthropology as well as feminist theory as it asks very foundational questions about the boundaries between nature and culture but in a non-linear fashion. Although Merleau-Ponty is not mentioned, Kirby takes up some kinds of issues that M-P would and did find fascinating: differenc/identity; root questions in the nature of gender; the discordance and concordance of the thinking/sensible being, of being human subject and object.

This book introduces what humans are made of, and bonds the boundary between our feelings, and our 'flesh' side. It is good if you are interested in somewhat of a metaphysical approach, and I recommend it for anyone with the time and open mind to read it.