In Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny,” he remarks that the mother’s womb is the place “where everyone once lived.” Once regarded as comforting and now simultaneously rendered terrifying and “other” through various sexual fantasies, this is uncanny. We need not take Freud’s work nor his psychoanalytic complexes in totality, though the idea he posits — that “love is a longing for home” — is central to a feminist “conception” — quite literally, as an idea and process in the womb — of the home and our bodies.
As students of the world, thinking about important issues, such as housing, migration and politics, we must return to our bodies as the original home, revisiting them as the ultimate site of materiality and subject-formation — the place where love and desire find a calm to fertilize. We must return to corporeality as essential in the formation of our sense of self and in an ethical (re)presentation of “home.”
Disregarding ontological perspectives of our bodies — as philosopher François Guéry puts it, we must know what the body can do, a bottom-up approach, before we know what it is — too often we grow detached from our bodies throughout the time being and becoming. The happenings of our limbs become unaccustomed to, and dragging the body’s heaviness around with our spirit becomes uncomfortable. Whether it be abuse, ill-fitting clothes, gender dysphoria or an absurdist attitude, feeling at home in our bodies sounds too abstract and impractical, and its safer to invest in other equally abstract, but normalized ideas, such as nations and borders. Political terminology, such as diet, regime and constitution, pervade the body politic and yet we may consider our nations as home, not our bodies.
This selective comfort and identification is in fact not normal, but rather a symptom of larger forces at play, though it always starts with us — corporeality in relation to transcorporeality. Especially in leftist circles, care for the world fails to translate into the personal, and as much as we dedicate ourselves to other causes we believe are beyond ourselves, we must reckon with their ruthless implication of and violence on our bodies as the material basis to prevailing ideologies — as a metaphysical space of violence.
Somewhere along the way, the relationship between us and our bodies become fractured, and Marxist scholars offer clarification. The body under capitalism is a laboring body, one that is merely productive and biological while alienated from the social body, which describes both the body in relation to the public sphere and a collective. Didier Deleule and Guéry attribute the machinization of the body and the complication of its meaning to the obliteration of subjectivity, which is replaced with the “marvellous intelligibility of finely-tuned gears” that must not grind too loudly. The body here could be thought of as a workplace itself, and there’s irony to be found here in the division of domestic labor to women — the “homebody.”
The idea that the body must not perform noticeably — existence and experience must not be explicit — contradictions are extrapolated onto the body — to be both tools, or extensions of ourselves, and our very own self, to be life affirmed, thinking, feeling and moving, and machine, disembodied and spiritless. Not only is the body minimized under capitalist production, but its function is forgotten to a world that once was and can be, before it can even be defined and empowered.
This violence on the body becomes the foundation to a Cartesian dualism, a scission between the body and the mind as well as nature and culture. As a feminist practice, we must reflect on Baruch Spinoza’s parallelism, in which the body and mind consist of and create one substance, or one being, and the mind is constituted by a particular bodily experience. To use the words of André Godfernaux, this means putting the mind “back into its real home, the body.” It means interrogating the ways in which culture interacts with the natural to construct meaningful and meaningless bodies, recovering its material to its rightful animator and thus approaching with subjectivity.
I keep returning to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” an unapologetic assertion of the cyborg’s bodily transgression of Western traditions and dualisms stemming from Aristotle’s canon, including mind/body, culture/nature, active/passive and whole/part. The cyborg embodies a new materialist school of thought, in which the body and mind are transversal and embolden dualism to its extreme, a point where a priori differences between psyche and soma cannot be made as all boundaries and contradictions amalgamate — something Freud suggests in describing the uncanny womb as at once paradoxical.
In line with Spinoza’s account, the body is a creative one, already and forever as productive as the Cartesian mind. It is something that is not “identical with itself across time.” These conceptions of the body as dynamic, as both ontological and epistemological and as the form of desire, not merely its location, create the conditions to fulfill the “longing for home” Freud describes.
Embodying the home is recentering our matter over mattering to profit-hungry vampires and entangling the psyche and soma as constitutive of our bodily experience — not merely lived as ourselves, but rather lived in. Our bodies are both structured and structuring as they interact with the material world around us, as we become part of the world and its currents — this is moreso a desiring praxis than an enclosed politics of self-love. I affirm my body’s porosity when its periphery is permeated by the world’s texture, and I’m assured of its corporeality as edifice when I “know my place” in an affective, opened body on the world. Home may mean many things to different people — it may be a memory, an imagined space, an ideal or a physical place — but at the very least, it’s where we all live and die.
Julie Ha is a senior double-majoring in comparative literature and English and is Pipe Dream’s opinions editor.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.