Wei(beta)t du, einer sagt, die Geschichte beruhe in letzter Instanz auf dem Korper des Menschen.1 In staging what might be called symbolically or metaphorically diseased condition of modern women, Elfriede Jelinek's Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen sets out to radically deconstruct integral body, identity, and language. In above quote, one of play's main figures alludes to Foucault's compelling notion that history ultimately rests on human body. That Jelinek's play would allude to Foucault is hardly surprising, since his analytics of power and processes of subjection offer feminist poststructuralists a useful framework for conceptualizing body as site of political struggle. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of Clinic, and The History of Sexuality (volume 1), Foucault posits body as a locus upon which rules, hierarchies, and metaphysical commitments of society are inscribed and reinforced.2 Although Foucault's influence has been duly noted in a few readings of this play, these references are brief and invariably tangential to a different interpretative focus.3 The Austrian playwright does acknowledge several other sources in her credits, yet Foucault is never mentioned by name.4 Nevertheless, it is impossible to avoid hearing unmistakable echoes of his account of power relations and subjection in Jelinek's dramatic enactment of sickness/disease-or-modern women. Indeed, both Jelinek's and Foucault's focus on power of perception, its force in subjection, and their attention to creation of matter in (medical) discourses, specifically, to constitution of bodies as illness at microlevel, merit exploration. How Jelinek and Foucault - in striking convergences - represent body and how it functions as metaphor for cultural and social crises presents one of significant sites in contemporary critical work where interactions of representation and power are made visible. Yet, surprisingly, despite Foucauldian resonance throughout play, scholarship on Krankheit has not established substantial connections between this play and Foucault's influence, nor has this commentary drawn on Foucauldian thinking in any extensive and meaningful way to examine power relations. Only a few studies deal explicitly with sexuality and power (Hofler), language and power (Luscher), and politics and power (Wigmore) in Krankheit. The body's centrality for analyses of subjection both in Jelinek's Krankheit and in Foucault is a function of its role in constituting a central tool through which poststructuralists launch their strike on classical thought and its linchpin, rational subject or cogito. Through body poststructuralism deconstructs Cartesian body/mind opposition, undermining Western civilization's prioritization of rational thought, spirit, and objectivity over emotions, passions, needs, and subjectivity. For an author like Jelinek whose oeuvre disrupts common sense beliefs and practices and rigorously detaches itself from assumption that there are essences to uncover, Foucault is useful for assessing whether it is strategically sound to speak of feminine subjectivity as or diseased, and for considering consequences and implications such a proposition might hold for an examination of gender relations. Though The Birth of Clinic concentrates on particular historical conjunctures, Foucault's formations nonetheless provide analytic paradigms of wider applicability to other eras and contexts: The Birth of Clinic is about seeing and naming human disease in eighteenth century-and, if modern woman is, metaphorically speaking or symbolically, ill or disease(d), then reading Foucault and Krankheit in conjunction with one another promises insight into reasons for which self-evident-whether this applies to sexed bodies or to sick bodies-appears as the given.5 By making sense of Ich bin krank, daher bin ich-utterance by Carmilla (K 44) from perspectives articulated in The Birth of Clinic, The History of Sexuality (vol. …