Notes

¹ I have discussed this confusion and its origins at some length in Miller 2007.
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² Here are a few other representative book titles: The Body in Pain; Writing and the Body; Body Politics; Bodies that Matter; Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud; Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body; Body Work; Slave to the Body; Scripting the Black Masculine Body; Politics of the Female Body; The New Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women. One section of a recent issue of Wired (January 2007) is called Beyond the Body: The Science of Human Enhancement.

A panel at the Modernist Studies Association meeting in October 2006 was entitled "The Avant-Garde Body." Below is the call for papers for that panel. I cite it because it gathers together in a few sentences received opinions within cultural studies about the body, including a tacit taking for granted of the more or less unproblematic materiality of the body:

Avant-garde art, performance, and theory of the early twentieth century portrayed the body as an entity to be molded, manipulated, and even transcended. Fused with machines, fashioned à la mode, or compressed into geometric shapes, avant-garde bodies functioned in the promotion of new social orders and visual forms. Yet many avant-gardists also regarded the body suspiciously, as a vestige of the natural world that remained resistant to aesthetic and political transformation. Such negotiations between the ideal and the reality of the body are the focal point of this panel. By redefining the body's role within avant-garde production and rhetoric, this panel will open up new ways of theorizing the social discourse of the body; explore the historical deprivileging of groups commonly associated with the body; and examine the body's function as an interdisciplinary site upon which visual, physical, and political culture converged during this period. We invite papers on avant-garde art, theater, literature, photography and film that consider some of the following questions: How has the dynamism of the live body worked with and against static or non-visual art forms? What role does the body play in styles that would seem to obfuscate or obliterate its presence (such as abstraction)? How did avant-garde figures construe the relation between the individual body and the body politic? How has the body served as a tool of (or a hindrance to) political and social cultural change? How has it been utilized to express attitudes towards gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality and class?

As you can see, almost everything is up for grabs in this call for papers except the question of what we mean by the materiality of the body. That is taken for granted as a given, on the basis of which all these further investigations will be carried out.
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³ The King James translation drops the enim and just says, "This is my body" (Matt. 26:26). I suppose this may have been to bypass controversies about whether the Eucharist is a matter of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or just as symbolic remembrance (as I was taught). If Jesus really said, in Aramaic, something like, "This is really, truly, my body," it is difficult to hold that he meant anything other than transubstantiation.
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⁴ In a forthcoming essay, "Touching Derrida Touching Nancy," I have attempted, among other things, to identify what is at stake in the differences between Nancy and Derrida on the questions of touch and the body.
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⁵ In the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, the Assyrian army is camped just outside the mountain pass leading to the besieged Jewish city of Bethulia. Judith entices the invading Assyrian General, Holofernes, in his tent, gets him drunk, and then beheads him with his own sword, thereby saving Bethulia and becoming a great heroine in Jewish history (Judith 12:12-20; 13:1-19).
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