Introduction

So far we have been tracing – with a focus on the body of the subject – the dynamics of power and ideology as a set of intertwining processes. We looked at how ideology and power cannot work, cannot present themselves to be, in the absence of the bodily matrix of subjectivity. An ethics of responsibility corresponds to the very beings of the ghostly body and the subject, we observed. This ethics has to question the ideology of immediacy that is commonsensically ascribed to the body. In this chapter I move on to deal with the processes that produce the body in its purported immediacy of being. These processes, as I trace, include the significatory and power mechanisms acting at multiple axes of identity. My focus is on the sexually differentiated body, as I find a discussion of bodily metaphors to lead inevitably to a discussion of sexual difference. Although I later devote a whole chapter (Chapter Four) to a detailed appreciation of the notion of ‘sexual difference,’ my prevailing concern is the identity of the woman – how ‘woman’ as a category is projected in its immediacy to a relationship with the body.

The act of naturalization of the body as something direct and unmediated is reflected and re-iterated in this move. The unthinking immediacy of sexual difference is commensurate with and a grounding instantiation of the given-ness of the body.