Building on a hermeneutic tradition in which accounts of carnal embodiment are overlooked, misunderstood, or underdeveloped, this work initiates a new field of study and concern.
Carnal Hermeneutics provides a philosophical approach to the body as interpretation. Transcending the traditional dualism of rational understanding and embodied sensibility, the volume argues that our most carnal sensations are already interpretations. Because interpretation truly goes “all the way down,” carnal hermeneutics rejects the opposition of language to sensibility, word to flesh, text to body.
In this volume, an impressive array of today’s preeminent philosophers seek to interpret the surplus of meaning that arises from our carnal embodiment, its role in our experience and understanding, and its engagement with the wider world.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Carnal Hermeneutics from Head to Foot
- WHY CARNAL HERMENEUTICS?
- 1 The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics
- 2 Mind the Gap: The Challenge of Matter
- RETHINKING THE FLESH
- 3 Rethinking Corpus
- 4 From the Limbs of the Heart to the Soul’s Organs
- 5 A Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited
- 6 Incarnation and the Problem of Touch
- 7 On the Phenomena of Suffering
- 8 Memory, History, Oblivion
- MATTERS OF TOUCH
- 9 Skin Deep: Bodies Edging into Place
- 10 Touched by Touching
- 11 Umbilicus: Toward a Hermeneutics of Generational Difference
- 12 Getting in Touch: Aristotelian Diagnostics
- 13 Between Vision and Touch: From Husserl to Merleau-Ponty
- 14 Biodiversity and the Diacritics of Life
- DIVINE BODIES
- 15 The Passion According to Teresa of Avila
- 16 Refiguring Wounds in the Afterlife (of Trauma)
- 17 This Is My Body: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Encharist
- 18 Original Breath
- 19 On the Flesh of the Word: Incarnational Hermeneutics
- Notes
- List of Contributors
- Index