Introduction

There is no obvious connection between the body as a category and the categories of power and ideology. The obscurity of this connection is the symptom of a not so hidden assumption regarding the ‘body’. A belief – that the body is only a concrete, immediate presence in three dimensional space – prevents the understanding of the links between the body and the ostensibly abstract notions of power and ideology. This book does not rest content with the knowledge that power and ideology are as palpably concrete as any other formation. Nor does it constrain itself to the insight (acquired through decades of painstaking critical scholarship now available in monographs, articles and commentaries) that the body is always and already mediated through categories of meanings and power. If mediations of power and ideology produce the body as something unmediated, then some form of ideological work has to be performed in order to produce this leap from the mediate to the immediate, to make the shift from the abstract to the concrete. This book tries to trace the itineraries of this work. It tries to observe and make visible the processes at work in producing the concreteness of the body from the abstract workings of meanings. One way of doing this is to describe different concrete modes of producing the category of the body through differentiating it from other categories like death and sexual difference.