Readers might be interested to know that the new issue of Film-Philosophy is now available here. Amidst a content of interesting looking papers, you will find my treatment of Cronenberg’s The Fly, read through the prism of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phantom limb. The embryonic germs of what I (rather hyperbolically) call “onto-necrology” are conceived in this paper. It is an idea I develop in “The Memory of Place” as a phenomenological rejoinder to the intellectual pollution caused by the hauntology industry. In a word, the idea concerns putting the body back in the ghost and likewise putting the ghost back in the body. I hope you enjoy.
The Return of the New Flesh: Body Memory in David Cronenberg and Merleau-Ponty
From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and obliges us to ask how human beings persist through different times, places, and bodily states while retaining their sameness. Traditionally, the response to this question has emphasised the importance of cognitive memory in securing the continuity of consciousness. But what has been underplayed in this debate is the question of how the body can both reinforce and disrupt the grounds for our personal identity. Accordingly, by turning the notoriously “body conscious” work of Cronenberg, especially his seminal The Fly (1986), I intend to pursue the relation between identity and embodiment in the following way.
First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind.
Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.
4 comments:
Dylan, I recently discovered your wonderful blog, and now your article in Film-Philosophy. Wanted to let you know that I have linked to that article and to the publisher's site for your upcoming book at the blog I maintain for the "Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research" at the Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany: http://medieninitiative.wordpress.com/. Really intrigued by your work, which resonates in some ways with my own (post-)phenomenological work on film. Looking forward to reading the book! All the best,
Shane
Thanks kindly for the comment, Shane, and for the link. Happy to be discovering your own work.
Cheers,
Dylan.
My pleasure, Dylan, and let me know if I can be of any assistance to you.
By the way, I'm especially looking forward to discovering the role of "transitionality" in The Memory of Place. My own engagement with Frankenstein films (in my dissertation) involves quite a bit of reflection on and theorization of transitionalities of various sorts (large and small-scale media transformations, technological changes, and especially the embodied experience of such transitions, which I take to fundamentally unsettle cognitive agencies through direct impingement upon phenomenological embodiment). And though I don't explicitly write much about the uncanny, I think the term fits quite well the experiences I'm trying to talk about, so again very much looking forward to reading your book--especially in light of the Merleau-Pontean perspective you've suggested as a corrective to the so-called hauntology industry.
Best,
Shane
Thanks for the comment, Shane. I think you’re right to point out the role of transitionality in disrupting the kinship between cognitive agency and the phenomenological body. It figures in the book in terms of two different ways of experiencing the same phenomena in the same body, thus producing a third mutated type of experience (I term it “alien flesh”), which might tie in with your work on Frankenstein, given the film’s themes of life as an outgrowth of death. Do please send me a link to this research, if it’s available.
Dylan.
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