Poststructuralism by Catherine Belsey

Author:Catherine Belsey [Belsey, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192603777
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Mind and body

Descartes claimed that, whereas he was a mind, he had a body. The two were radically distinct from one another. The organism had its own mechanical processes and reflexes, but reason was wholly independent of physiology. If we now take for granted that psychological tension causes headaches, or stress affects our immune system, we owe that recognition in part to psychoanalysis, which as early as the 1890s began attributing physical symptoms to unconscious desires.

But psychoanalysis does not on that account settle for the idea that a human being is best understood as an undifferentiated ‘whole’. On the contrary: the relation between the organism and the subject is an uneasy one, to the degree that we become subjects at the price of an organic loss. This loss is not simply a single event in the past, but repeats itself throughout human life, and we subsist as an uneasy conjunction of organic impulses and cultural values, each at the expense of the other.

The term ‘subject’, then, is not just a jargon word for ‘self’. While what we mean by ‘the self’ (or ‘person’ or ‘individual’) is generally the whole package, the subject is divided both within itself and from the organism. As what signifies, the subject is, on the one hand, conscious (rational, deliberate), and on the other hand, unconscious (motivated by desires that make themselves known only indirectly in dreams, slips, jokes, or symptoms). Meanwhile, this divided subject is inseparable from the body—when the organism dies the subject ceases to exist—but at the same time, it is distinguishable from the body, if only to the extent that each is conceivable only at the price of the loss of the other. As pure organism, I would not be a subject. At the same time, I cannot ever be pure subject, because I remain an organism.

We are born human beings, in that we are the offspring of two human parents; we become subjects as a result of cultural construction. But we are haunted by what culture does not know about us.

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