Cutting It Off: Bodily Integrity, Identity Disorders, and the Sovereign Stakes of Corporeal Desire in U.S. Law

Abstract

DESCARTES THE WANNABE: AMPUTATION AND LIBERAL PHILOSOPHY In Discourse on Method and Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, Descartes prefaces his much-famed cogito with curious series of physical acts. Before announcing that he thinks, and therefore he is, Descartes first dismembers himself, asking what of his would remain were he to amputate his ears, his arms, his eyes (Dayan 1995). Descartes concludes: Although seems to be united to body, I recognize that if foot or arm or any other part of body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from mind (Descartes 1986, 59). Even as Descartes degrades, discards, and dismisses physical experience in relation to human subjectivity, his discovery of first principle ofthat humanity nonetheless depends on his traversement and modification of corporeality that he calls his own. Invoking prior whole body that properly belongs to or lies under domain of his I, Descartes arrives at his enlightenment through fantasy of his ability to discorporate, take apart that supposed prior whole. His sovereignty of self follows from sovereignty of corpus. Or, if regime of sovereignty might bleed into regime of property, his self becomes his own (Best 2004). In considering political and inherited stakes of what makes body one's own or sovereign, of what makes body count as whole, and of privileges that counting as might bring, I am writing this essay squarely on backs of many infinite others. I do so in hope of building an intellectual practice that responds to exploitative, violent connections between juridical sovereignty of U.S. and enforcement of corporeal wholeness or integrity. For example, Nikki Sullivan and Susan Stryker have an important forthcoming article on this very subject. Focusing on self-demand amputation and transsexual surgery, Sullivan and Stryker trace concept of bodily through histories of sovereign in order to show how urgendy we have been missing critique of integrity as an enabling fiction that works to legitimize all-too-material distributions of capital, property, and freedom in contemporary sphere. In end, Descartes, stripped of his limbs and eyes and ears at his own volition, triumphandy proclaims that he has become what he has always truly been, a (Descartes 1986). The thinking aspect aside, I am struck by ease with which Descartes elides into reification, into thing rather than subject with which he began. For Descartes, assertion and imagining of agency that allows him to become an individuated subject also allows him to throw it all away, to become not subject but thing. In this sense, his self-amputation, his musculation into thing-ness marks apotheosis and exemplary of his newly minted subjecthood. How to read this moment, then, knowing full well that in United States, making of people-as-things was juridical prerogative of hundreds of years of African chattel slavery, of laws that guaranteed that wives would function as property of husbands and girls as property of fathers (Best 2004; Farley 2004; Johnson 2003; Pateman 1988)? It seems easy to say that problem here might be notion of liberal consent, or agency - that what matters is whether you or make me into thing (Johnson 2003). Rather than attempt to scale philosophical peak of Mount Agency direcdy, however, in this essay I will attempt to make series of small cuts and observations into sexed and gendered politics of bodily in contemporary U.S. law. In doing so, I am leaving aside much work on particularly raced character of U.S. sovereignty, and on how connections between bodily and U.S. sovereignty continue to organize around white supremacy. Here I am mindful of Timothy Mitchell's writing on process by which writers fetishize, reify, and unify effects and processes through repetition of the state as literary and substantive conceit. …