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In his recent paper, "ARCHITECTURE AS A SIGN OF RITES OF PASSAGE,"Antonio Grgić wrote as follows:
| According to Richard Koenigsberg, the individual ego tends to identify itself with the national one; he claims that human beings exist in a symbolic relation with their societies. Individuals identify very profoundly and our ego may become one with the national ego. According to Koenigsberg, Foucault should be read backwards: it is not the discourse that shapes the body; instead, the body is a source of discourse. Body politic is not a mere metaphor, but expresses the fact that the nation is experienced as the body. |
It's time for me to take responsibility for my theory, once and for all, which means overturning or "disrupting" the discourse that has ruled the academic world for the past forty years: the idea that "language" structures the body; that language is an independent variable, the body a dependent variable.
I theorize the body as an independent varible and hypothesize that discourse--in many cases--is a dependent variable. Bodily experience and fantasies about the body "work their way up" to structure ideas and ideologies.
The term "body politic" is not merely a metaphor: we experience nations as bodies. We project our own bodies into nations.
Like our bodies, nations are conceived to have firmly established boundaries. What's more, nations function as if possessing an immune system: rejecting alien or not-self or foreign cells (what contemporary theorists call "others").
I'm going to provide data supporting my theory--and expand upon it--in a series of Newsletters. Why am I doing this through a series of Newsletters as opposed to in journal articles or books? This is a long, long story. Perhaps I'll tell this story some day.
However, for the time being, as Norman O. Brown used to say, this is the way things have turned out.
Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg
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