The Negating Body: A Psychoanalytic‐Phenomenology Approach to Explaining the Source of Dichtomizing

Abstract

AbstractCriticizing the tendency of modernist thought to assume a world of dichotomies does not explain the dichotomies as social facts with serious consequences for human life and relations. Based on a critical reading of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, this article elaborates a theory for such an explanation. It argues that dichotomizing, far from being universal to human experience or the result of specific historical circumstances, is powered most fundamentally by negating bodies, which repress an archaic desire in humans to connect with others and the world. The human body can also be socialized to affirm this desire, though negating and affirming bodies are not so much oppositional as they are implicated in each other's psychosomatic dispositions. The article enriches the anthropological study of human subjectivity and demonstrates the use of bringing psychoanalysis and phenomenology to bear on matters of importance to anthropology, related fields, and critical current events.