Body Formulations

What is the body? A ground of existence, or a target? A spectacle, or a battlefield? While modern thought long considered the body as merely natural, biological, or secondary, in the 20th century, the body moved to the center of both philosophical thought and political struggles.

This book traces the philosophical, political, and aesthetic footprints of the body, guided by two powerful figures who shaped contemporary thought: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon. It unites a philosophical understanding of the body, shaped within the tangible universe of phenomenology and intertwined with the world, with a political understanding expressed in the rebellion of the Black body, pierced by racism and branded by the colonial gaze. It treats the body not as a tool or an object, but as the focal point for encountering and transforming the world. In the journey from Merleau-Ponty's proposition "I am my body" to Fanon's cry "I am the world," it examines the body whose voice was silenced by the cogito, focusing on the fissures opened by myth, madness, and hallucination, the power of the gaze etched onto the skin, the history violence writes on muscles, and the fraternity of the political permeating tissues, with contemporary examples from recent developments and literature.

Body Formulations offers a unique platform for discussion, inviting us to consider the body as both a philosophical and political actor, daring to develop a body politics and a world ethic at the intersection of these two thinkers.