Review

Author(s): Wimal Dissanayake

Review by: Wimal Dissanayake
Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 276-278
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1399781
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 for Chinese cosmologists, I wonder if more should not be made of the
traditional sanction for Ch'ing "anticosmology." A typical reticence on
the subject of cosmology is preserved in the canonical observations that
"the doings of high Heaven are without sound or smell" and that "yin
and yang are unfathomable": mystery, yes; problem, no. An appeal to
the Greek meaning of "cosmos" (already noted) as implying "order,"
"harmony," "pattern," and so forth, may beg the question of cross-
cultural conceptions of harmony. Thus the ordered cosmos depicted
by Henderson is easily recognizable as such by Western as well as by
Chinese standards. The Ch'ing "anticosmos," on the other hand, is an
anticosmos by Greek standards (for example) rather than by Chinese. To
put it tersely, the Greeks deplored anomaly; the Chinese glorified it, often
seeing in it not a loss but an increase of harmony. That this statement
sounds bizarre to Western ears merely illustrates the point. Well might
classical studies have done more than astronomy both to precipitate and
to limit change in Ch'ing cosmology. I would further suggest that one
reason why philosophically minded Confucians tolerated correlative cos-
mology as long as they did was because of a lack of interest: might it be
that those who hastened its demise were the very ones who were suffi-
ciently interested in it to attack it knowledgeably?

NOTE

1 - See also Daniel L.Overmyer's excellent review in American Historical

Review 90 (1985): 1252-1253.

Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Parts One, Two, and Three.
Edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. New York:
Urzone, 1989. Pp. 1610.

Wimal Dissanayake The last decade has seen a sharp increase in the scholarly interest in the
East-WestCenter human body, and the three volumes under review here are emblematic
of this phenomenon. What is interesting about these three volumes is
that they advance an interesting perpective on the understanding of the
human body and on the different modes in which the human body is
constructed. The emphasis here is not so much on the scientific knowl-
edge of the body or the diverse ideologies that conspire to misrepresent
the body as on the body as a reality that is continually produced and
reproduced in society. The contributors to these volumes, in their diverse
ways, are involved in the task of decoding some of these modes of
PhilosophyEast& West construction.

276

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 The mapping out of the modalities of construction of the human
body, understandably enough, leads into discussions of politics, ethics,
and questions of power. The ground-breaking work of Foucault, Elias,
Kantorawicz, and the work of Nietzsche from whom they took their cue,
have no doubt inspired many of the writers in these three volumes. Con-
sequently, some of the most valuable insights in these essays illuminate
the nature of the human body as a terrain on which power is exercised
and resisted.
The emphasis in part I is on the relationship between the human body
and divinity, bestiality, and technology. What is interesting here is the
focus of analysis: it is not how a Christian mystic or an ancient Greek
warrior imagines gods in terms of the human body but rather "what kind
of body do these same Greeks, Christians, Jews, or Chinese endow them-
selves with-or attempt to acquire-given the power they attribute to
the divine." Part I consists of sixteen essays that range from investigations
into the female body and religious practices in the late Middle Ages to a
discussion of somaticity and rationality in medieval Japan with special
reference to ghosts and human beings.
Part II is concerned with a broadly defined psychosomatic approach
to the human body where questions of the communication of emotion
and the implications of pain and death, as well as the conception of the
soul, loom large. In keeping with the basic approach of the editors when
discussing human emotion, for example, the focus is not on the ways in
which supposedly universal emotions are communicated, but on the
"singularity of the emotions immanent in the commonsense that pro-
duce them." Part IIconsists of fifteen essays dealing with such topics as
the ethics of gesture, body-person, and heart-mind in China during the
last 150 years; religious healing and the representation of the body in
Japan; and a new reading of 'Phaedo' in relation to the body and soul.
Part IIIis concerned with the complex interrelationships that subsist
among the human body, social mechanisms, and the cosmos. The em-
phasis here is largely on metaphorizing-how certain organs and bodily
substances are employed as metaphors for portraying and naturalizing
human society and beyond. This part consists of seventeen essays that
address such topics as the political use of body metaphors in the Middle
Ages, ancient theories concerning semen and blood, personal status and
sexual practices in the Roman empire, and bodily images in Melanesia.
Taken as a whole, these three volumes contribute significantly to the
understanding of the human body. The essays gathered in these volumes
cover a broad range of historicities, temporalities, and geographies; the
editors have cast their nets as wide as possible. Naturally, some essays
are better than others. The forty-eight essays do not add up to a coher-
ent and unified statement-indeed, it was not the intention of the
editors to accomplish this, as is evidenced by the fact that the operative BookReviews

277

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 word in the title is "fragments." One would have liked to see more
discussion on the relationships among human beings, animals, and ma-
chines in the light of recent advances in modern science. Although the
editors and many of the contributors to these volumes are clearly in-
spired by modern French thinkers, after reading these volumes, one
comes away with the feeling that the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix
Guattari, Jacque Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Jacque Lacan, and Luce Irigaray
could have been pressed into service with valuable results. However, it
needs to be said that these three volumes open up a productive ap-
proach to the study of the human body that should be of equal value to
humanists and social scientists alike.

PhilosophyEast& West

278

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