Alphonso Lingis

Microorganisms luxuriate in, plants push through, the humus, that is, the corpses of plants, insects, birds and mammals. Insects, fish, birds, and mammals nourish themselves with the flesh of plants on hand, and also with that of insects, fish, birds, and mammals. In the natural world, everything assimilates and is assimilated. Every animal, from amoebas to the blue whales, feels moments of fear, for they know they are vulnerable and mortal. As they eat what is at hand they sense that what will eat them is already at hand.

When someone there is standing before us, we have been cautioned that he is not speaking with his own voice but speaking the language of his gender, his family, his class, his education, his culture, his economic and political interests, his unconscious drives, indeed his state of physical health and alertness. Are we then doing no more than interpreting what he says and does? Do we ever make contact with what he means for himself when he says "I"—with his visions, the story he tells himself of his life?

Foreign Bodies analyzes how our culture elaborates for us the bodies we have by natural evolution. Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us