Volatile Bodies

Volatile Bodies is based on a risky wager: that all the effects of subjectivity, psychological depth and inferiority can be refigured in terms of bodies and surfaces. It uses, transforms and subverts the work of a number of distinguished male theorists of the body (Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Schilder, Nietzsche, Foucault, Lingis and Deleuze) who, while freeing the body from its subordination to the mind, are nonetheless unable to accomodate the specificities of women's bodies.This book explores various dissonances in thinking the relation between mind and body. It investigates issues that resist reduction to these binary terms - psychosis, hypochondria, neurological disturbances, perversions and sexual deviation - and most particularly the enigmatic status of body fluids, and the female body.

Introduction and acknowledgmentsPart I. Introduction1 Refiguring bodiesPart II The inside out2 Psychoanalysis and physical topographies3 Body images: neurophysiology and corporeal mappings4 Lived bodies: phenomenology and the fleshPart III The outside in5 Nietzsche and the choreography of knowledge6 The body as inscriptive surface7 Intensities and flowsPart IV Sexual difference8 Sexed bodiesNotesBibliographyIndex

Elizabeth Grosz is one of Australia's best-known feminist theorists and teaches in Philosophy, Women's Studies and Critical Theory at Monash University in Melbourne. She is the author of Sexual Subversions: Three French feminists and Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction, and editor of six collections of feminist theory.