des erfahrenden Subjektes” (Hauser-Schäublin et al. 2001: 134). Hauser-Schäublin et. al use a comparison to illustrate Schmitz’s distinction: If one touches a hot stove, the experience of pain is total (i.e. absolute locality); looking at the hand one realizes that it is just the fingertip that was burned (making absolute locality into a relative locality) (Hauser-Schäublin 2001). The differentiation between Leib and Körper, as articulated by Hermann Schmitz, seems especially important in the area of socio-cultural medicine, for example, as a means of understanding the different meanings of illness that connect to the Leiblichkeit, i.e. the subjective feelings, and disease that connect to the diagnosable, the objectively visible. Reflections on the experiential inability to have subjective feelings to be considered by other actors within the limitations of the discursive space in which medical practice is set, were a core topic of the conversations I had with former “infertility patients.” Here, patients referred to the difference but also to the interrelatedness between subjective feelings and diagnosis.
The theologian Christian Schwarke offers an insight into the Christian tradition of understanding Leib and soul as a unity (Schwarke 2006). Modern medicine and technology, which enable and build upon the fragmentation of bodies as a core part of its performance can, following Schwarke, be seen as an opposition to Christian tradition (ibid). The reference to Leiblichkeit in Christian texts is found in the story of Jesus’ resurrection. Leiblichkeit was the guarantor for identity, which Schwarke explains using the example of the apostle Thomas requesting to put his fingers into Jesus’ wounds in order to believe in his resurrection, and hence, confirm his identity as that of Jesus who had lived on earth (ibid: 64). Schwarke, furthermore, points out that the (public) fragmentation of a human body has a solid history in the English early modern age as being a harsher punishment for a person than the death penalty. However, the fragmentation of corpuses, not as a punishment but as a tool to enhance the position of those in political power, has been recognized since the Middle Ages. Here the fragmentation of bodies after death and the burying of body parts in different places was a means of claiming power beyond death (ibid: 66). The fragmentation of a body allows what has not been possible while alive; to be present in different locations at the same time (ibid). Schwarke summarizes: “Das Christentum hat an vielen Stellen die Einheit von Leiblichkeit und Geistigkeit ebenso betont, wie es eine faktische Fragmentierung des Körpers (vielleicht gerade wegen des Vertrauens in die transzendente Einheit [53] von Leib und Seele) befördert hat. In dieser Perspektive muss Identität auch in Bezug auf den Leib stets hergestellt werden. Identität findet man nicht vor”40 (ibid: 71).
Why is this historical insight of value for this study? Nothing comes to humanity without historical connections: without being drenched with historicity. Histories are intersectional. They “are mobile” and they are subject to oppression, care, or neglect (Rothberg 2009: 313). Within the cultural and religious context Schwarke’s writing focuses on, the fragmentation of the corpus was historically understood to be the greatest punishment for the individual and its bodily integrity. Today, the death (or brain death)41 of a person is the prerequisite for a (final) “fragmentation” that, if considered a fragmentation for the good (which could, as described above, even be for use in an art exhibition), seems ethically justifiable. Schwarke’s historical examination provides a background for, for example, asking how one can understand (and question) where (virtual) locations of fragmented and mobilized body parts are: especially locations that “cannot be seen, distinguished or captured in words easily,” such as “the new location” of the lip in the face transplantation example above. It’s the location that is new, not the lip. Asking questions that regard (interpersonal) locality, such as “where?,” “between whom?,” and so on can assist analyzing how the gradual development of “identity” (and imparting of subjectivity) comes into play in the context of RTGs, specifically when examining what the locations are that bodily substances can be “found” in: fridges, Petri dishes, “recipients’ wombs,” and so on. “Fragmenting bodies” and placing bodily substances in such locations does not happen in a social vacuum, or disconnected from cultural values that are tied to ideas about the potential of bodies to be fragmentable, questions of identity and ownership, and generativity. I will address how Leib appears in processes of fragmentation, and how concepts of Leib can foster analyzing the “terror” of fragmentation for example, when looking at the artist’s Orlan’s work later in this book (Wenner 2002).
[54] 2.3.1 On the Interface of Body, Leib and Körper – Phenomenology and Post- structural Thoughts
“Any kind of technological usage bears in itself a
possible modification of our Leib.
Any chosen technology is not neutral and it
moulds us by depositing sedimentations”
(Liberati 2014: 184).
“[…] knowledge can not be separated from
the bodily world of feeling and sensation; knowledge is bound up
with what makes us sweat, tremble, all those feelings
that are crucially felt on the bodily surface,
the skin surface where we touch
and are touched
by the world” (Ahmed 2004: 171).
Having illustrated different approaches through which bodies are framed in public spaces, having discussed issues arising in translations between German and English, and having outlined historical and philosophical understandings of the relationship between Leib and Körper, in the following pages I will elaborate on some key theoretically influential developments for the study of body and Leib, which do not explicitly use the term or refer to Leib. This section will name a selection of theorists whose work will be used in this study as examples in order to point to the range of voices and disciplines that are concerned with the body.
My intention throughout this study is to keep sight of the body as cultural, political, social, and historical as described by Michel Foucault and to attend to its discursive disposition as developed by, for example, Judith Butler (Butler 1993, 2015, Foucault 2008, 2010, 2014). References to Foucault’s work within this study led to including theoretical voices that revisited, sought to challenge, or extended Foucault’s work, such as Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” as it relates to “sovereign power” – Agamben’s response to Foucault’s bio power (Agamben 2016, 2014, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2000, 1998). Poststructuralist approaches to the body as have been (further) developed by, for example, Sara Ahmed, Foucault, or Butler, and phenomenological approaches developed by Helmuth Plessner, Hermann Schmitz, Merleau-Ponty, or Edmund Husserl must be acknowledged as fundamentally different, although they may potentially be located within the same schools of thought (Plessner 1985, Merleau- Ponty 1966, Husserl 1998 and 1946, Schmitz 1965 and 1967). However, these theoretical (poststructuralist and phenomenological) approaches are methodologically “combinable” in sociological, theoretical and empirical work.
One possible reading of Butler’s earlier work is that in framing a somewhat flexible feasibility of the body as an “effect of the intellect,” Butler’s re-signification [55] of the materiality of the body as intelligible and malleable “paves,” on a theoretical level, ways to consider technologies as co-inhabiting the power to perform and confirm the “produceability” (Herstellbarkeit) of beingness (Butler 1997).42 Such understanding, however, has the potential (planned or not) to support theoretical frameworks that serve advancing key features of modernity, such as effectiveness, plan-ability, and feasibility.43 These in turn can foster discourses in RGTs that “declare void” notions of hope and can empower discourses that conceptualize the mind (as separate from the body) as the main maker of bodies. However, in contrast to, for example, Duden’s critique of Butler’s work as reducing the body to being discursive, my reading of Butler agrees more with Robert Gugutzer’s interpretation of her work (Gugutzer 2004). He lays out that within the focus of Butler’s work the interweaving/entanglement of discourse and matter allow an understanding of the materiality of body and its linguistic signification as inextricably connected (Gugutzer 2004, Butler 1997). From this perspective, Butler’s work can be used in connection with phenomenological approaches, having in mind that a reading