“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.

Art and literature have often taken the opposite course, turning to the body in all of its excess, messiness, and states of decay and transformation. No longer subordinated to perception, the body becomes a marked surface, a palimpsest for inscription. Attuned to Nietzsche, Foucault reframes the body as the site where history is etched and produced, describing it as “the inscribed surface of events, the locus of a dissociated self,” noting that “nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition” or recognition of others. This reveals an unstable materiality, always in process, neither subject nor object, immersed in social forces and historical change. Without a fixed form, the body is then never whole, nor can it ever simply coincide with itself, which is perhaps the very reason it remains a target for shaping and discipline.

This seminar aims to consider the material body from within this philosophical-literary nexus as a primary site of political, social, literary, or philosophical inscription. Topics may include but are not limited to: 

• Historical/philosophical conceptions of embodiment
• The body in/of Literature 
• Biopower and the body politic
• Body and temporality
• Body and capitalist (re)production
• Prosthesis and posthumanism
• Spectrality and the body
• Animality
• Illness and the body in medicine / anti-bodies / auto-immunity
• Dysphoria
• Transgenderism / transsexuality 
• Artistic depictions of the body

Submission Instructions:

The deadline for paper proposals is Thursday, October 2, 2025 (EST).

To submit a proposal (approximately 300 words / 1500 characters) and a brief bio, please use the ACLA portal at the following link:
https://www.acla.org/seminar/e9c5be37-fce7-44fa-a315-077095abddc1

Submissions sent by email cannot be accepted.

For questions, feel free to reach out to Britt Zeldenrust (bzeldenr@iu.edu) or David Bordelon (dbordel@iu.edu).