If you are flipping through the stations on your television, your attention might suddenly be caught by the beating and pulsing of exposed flesh, flayed open, displayed upon your screen. In the extremely popular American cable-television program, The Operation,1 actual medical operations are taped and then aired, allowing the viewer to observe the cutting into and exposure of the internal and bloody flesh of the patient. These operations are distinguished by the particular part of the body cut into, as well as the type of procedure performed, graphically illustrating what we already know, that the insides of the body are not beyond a reduction to the systematicity of cognitive thinking. For modern medical knowledge there are no mysterious inner depths that cannot be made visible. These depths are simply further surface layers that can be representationally laid out through such techniques as magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, or the surgeon's blade. Similarly, Michel Foucault, whose works have been central to theoretical discussions of the body, argues that there are no interior and mysterious subjective depths that are only open to hermeneutic interpretation and cannot be objectively observed. According to Foucault, the modern age is characterized by an epistemological project that prioritizes an understanding of human subjectivity, a project that is paradoxical because the subject seeks knowledge about itself even as it recognizes its own limitations as a knower. The resulting hermeneutic quest for knowledge leads further and further into the depths of the subject where truth is hidden; but for Foucault, it is this very quest which in fact produces those depths. What is thought to be deeply embedded in the interiority of the subject is in fact that which is produced on the surfaces of the body in what Gilles Deleuze refers to as a double folding of the outside and the inside which creates interiority and depth.2 In making these pronouncements, Foucault holds phenomenology up as exemplary of this practice since, in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, phenomenologists assert an interior subjectivity that is temporally structured and thus always open to interpretation. However, Foucault's dismissal of phenomenological descriptions of embodied subjectivity as not only epistemologically particular to the modern episteme, but also as inherently colonizing leads him to privilege the spatialization of the body over the temporality of the phenomenological subject through his denial of depth, and his privileging of the surface. Indeed, Foucault's own methodological approaches are also embedded in the modern episteme in another offspring of Cartesian thinking, the positivistic tendency to acknowledge only that which is apparently there, sacrificing the mysteriousness of existence that shows itself in appearing, but also in the concealing from which appearances emerge. For the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Foucault's predecessor and former teacher,3 this concealment is inherent to the depth of embodied being. In particular, he intuits the significance of depth as not merely a Cartesian interior, a human nature that seeks outward expression, but rather as the intertwining of spatiality and temporality of the embodied subject that allows it to encounter the world. Drawing on this phenomenological description of depth as embodied, it is possible to show how spatiality can only be understood temporally.4 Even though descriptions of the temporal subject are found in phenomenology in general, Merleau-Ponty's contributions to our understanding of depth and of the subject as embodied show us that the intertwining of temporality and spatiality is dependent upon an underlying essence or capacity of the primordial body to be phenomenologically open. Although Foucault rejects the phenomenological methodology because he argues that it is not able to fully take into account its reliance upon language for defining how the visible is seen, this rejection has its price. …