Fact and Fantasy: The body of desire in the age of posthumanism

Abstract

This essay proceeds by presenting different 'takes' on corporeality in the age of posthumanism. Alternating theoretical reflections with personal experiences and/or observations on aspects of embodiment--and thus trying to do justice to Merleau-Ponty's insight that any body is always already a 'body-in-the-world'--it seeks to explore the function of fantasy generally and of cultural production in particular in the process of the body/subject's differentiated becomings. Additionally taking into account the increasing 'technologization' of bodily matter and corporeal practices in the Western world today, these cumulative reflections eventually result in an attempt to combine, or rather assemble, the ostensibly incommensurable ideas on the body/subject offered by Freud and Deleuze/Guattari, respectively, to point up the critical role of fantasy, operating as the necessary interface, in the material/cultural production of embodied subjectivity.

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