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Utopian body, by Michel Foucault

This conference dates from 1966, the book integrates utopian body. heterotopias

Foucault In this conference, which was recently published in Castilian, "the body is first" the opposite of a utopia ", in" absolute "," ruthless ", which is confronting utopia of the soul. But eventually the body, visible and invisible "," penetrable and opaque ", it being" the main actor of all utopian "and just shut up before the mirror before the body or face of love.

Just open my eyes, I can not escape this place Proust, sweetly, earnestly, comes to occupy once again in every waking (1). Not that I key in place, because after all, I can not just move and remove, but I can move it, remove, change of place-but there is a problem: I can not move without him I can not leave it there I where to go elsewhere. I can go to the end of the world, I can hide, in the morning, under my blankets, make me as small as possible, I can let myself melt in the sun on the beach, but there will always be where I am. He is here, irreparably never elsewhere. My body is the opposite of a utopia, is what is never under another sky, is the absolute, the small bit of space with which, strictly speaking, I embody.

My body, ruthless topia. What if, fortunately, I live with him in a kind of worn familiarity, as a shadow, and with those things every day that I finally stopped seeing life and took second place, as these vents, those roofs that collect every afternoon at my window? But every morning, the same injury, under my eye is drawn inevitably imposes a mirror image: a thin face, shoulders arched, myopic eyes, no hair, nothing cute, really. It is in this ugly shell my head, in this cage I do not like, which I have to show and pasearme; through this lattice have to talk, look, to be regarded, under the skin have to burst. My body is a hopeless place that I'm doomed. After all, I think it's against him and to delete it so that all these utopias were born. The prestige of utopia, the beauty, the wonder of utopia, what should be? Utopia is a place outside of all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without a body, a body that will be beautiful, clear, transparent, bright, fast, colossal in its power infinite in duration, detached, invisible, secure, always transfixed, and it is quite possible that the first utopia, one that is the ineradicable in the heart of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal body. The fairyland, the land of the elves, of genius, Magicians, and well, is the country where the bodies are transported as fast as light, is the country where the wounds heal with a balsam wonderful lightning time, is the country where one can fall from a mountain and get up alive, is the country where it is visible when you want, invisible when you want. If there is a magical country is really in it for me is an enchanted prince and dandies all become pretty hairy, ugly as bears.

But there is a utopia that is meant to remove the bodies. That Utopia is the land of the dead, are the utopian cities we stopped the Egyptian civilization. After all, the mummies, what are they? Utopia is denied and transfigured body. The mummy is the great utopian body that persists over time. There were also gold masks Mycenaean civilization put on the faces of the dead kings, glorious utopia of their bodies, powerful, lots, horror hosts. There were paintings and sculptures of the tombs, the reclining, which extend from the Middle Ages in immobility and a youth that will never end. There are now, today, those little cubes of marble, the stone geometrized bodies, regular and white figures on the big black box of the cemeteries. And in this city of utopia from the dead, it happened that my body becomes solid as a thing, eternal like a god.

But perhaps the toughest, the most powerful of these utopias why erase the sad body topology provides us the great myth of the soul, from the bottom of Western history. The soul in my body works in a very wonderful. It is housed, of course, but is well known to escape from him escape to see things through the windows of my eyes, escapes to dream when I sleep, to survive when I die. My soul is beautiful, pure, white, and if my body muddy, at any rate is not very clean-dirty, sure to be a virtue, sure to be a power, sure there are thousand sacred gestures that reset in primal purity. My soul will last a long time, and over a long time, when my old body will rot. Let my soul! It is my Light, purified, virtuous, agile, mobile, warm, cool, but my body smooth, neutered, rounded like a bubble soap.

And lo, my body, by virtue of all these utopias, has disappeared. Has disappeared as the flame of a candle for someone blows. The soul, the tombs, the spirits and fairies are appropriated by the force of it, they did disappear in the blink of an eye, blew on his weight on his ugliness, and I restored shining and perpetual.

But my body, indeed, no subject is left so easily. After all, he has his own resources of the fantastic, it also has places and places without deeper, more stubborn even than the soul, that the tomb, that the charm magicians. Has its cellars and lofts, have their stays dark, bright beaches. My head, for example, my head: what a strange cave and opened to the outside world through two windows, two openings, I'm pretty sure that, as I see in the mirror, and besides, I can close one or the other separately. And yet there is only one of these openings, because before me I see only a single landscape, continuous, without partitions or cuts. And on that head, how things happen? Well, things come and stay in it. Enter there, and I'm very sure that things come into my head when I look, because the sun, when it is too strong and it dazzles me, going to tear up the back of my brain, and yet these things come into my head really still on the outside, as I see before me and, to achieve, in my turn I should go. Main

incomprehensible and opaque penetrable body, open and closed body: body utopian. Body quite visible, in one sense: I know very well what is being watched by someone else from head to foot, I know what is being watched from behind, watched over his shoulder, surprised when I least expect it, I know what it is to be naked, but that same body that is so visible, is removed, is captured by a kind of invisibility that I can never apart. That skull, the back of my head that I can sound out there, with my fingers, but never see, that back, I feel supported against the thrust of the mattress on the sofa when I'm lying, but just be surprised by the cunning of a mirror, and what is he, whose movements and positions accurately know but I can never see without writhe horribly. The body phantom that appears only in the mirage of the mirrors, still, in a piecemeal fashion. Do we really need the jinn and fairies, and death and the soul to be inextricably both visible and invisible? And that body is lightweight, transparent, is imponderable, nothing less thing to him: he runs, works, lives, desires, is left without resistance through all my intentions. Yes, but until the day when I feel pain, which deepens the cavern of my belly, which block, which stuck in tow that fill my chest and throat. Until the day he crashed into the back of my mouth, toothache. Then, then let there be light imponderable, etc., I turn thing, fantastic architecture and ruins.

No, really, you do not need no magic spell, you do not need a soul or a death that is both opaque and transparent, visible and invisible, life and thing to be utopia enough to be a body. All these utopias why he dodged my body, just had its model and first point of application, have their origin in my own body. I was wrong a while ago saying that utopias were turned against the body and intended to delete it: they were born of the body and perhaps then turned against him.

However, one thing is certain, is that the human body is the main actor of all utopias. After all, one of the utopias older men told themselves, would not dream of bodies is immense, disproportionate, which devour space and dominate the world? It's the old utopia of the giants, located in the heart of many legends in Europe, Africa, Oceania, Asia, the old legend that for so long fed the Western imagination, from Prometheus to Gulliver.

body also is a great actor utopian when it comes to masks, makeup and tattoos. Masquerade, makeup, tattoos, not exactly, as one might imagine, to acquire another body, just a little more beautiful, better decorated, more easily recognizable, tattoos, makeup, masked, is certainly something very different, is to enter the body communicate with secret powers and invisible forces. The mask, the symbol tattooed on the shaved body lay a whole language, whole language enigmatic throughout a coded language, secret, sacred, calling on the same body the violence of God, the power of the sacred deaf or vivacity of desire. The mask, tattoo, shaved body placed in another space, they do get into a place that has no place in the world directly, make that body a fragment of space imagery that will communicate with the world of gods or with the universe on the other. One is possessed by the gods or the person you just seduce. In any case, the mask, tattoo, shave are operations by which the body is ripped to their own space and projected into another space.

Listen, for example, the Japanese story and the way a tattoo artist passed a universe that is not our body of the girl he wants:

"The sun shot its rays on River and set fire to the fourth of seven mats. Its rays reflected on the water surface forming a golden wave design on the paper screens and on the face of the girl asleep. Seikichi, having run the walls, took in his hands the tools of tattoo. For some moments he remained mired in a kind of ecstasy. Right now, fully savored the strange beauty of the young. It seemed he could sit still for that face to tens and hundreds of years without ever experiencing or fatigue or boredom. Just as the people of Memphis once embellished the magnificent land of Egypt pyramids and sphinxes, and with all your love Seikichi wanted to beautify your skin fresh picture of the girl. He immediately applied the tip of his brush of color held between the thumb, ring and little finger of his left hand, and as the lines were drawn, the needle pricked with his right hand sustained. "

And if you think that clothing is sacred or secular, religious or civil entering ago individual in the confined space of the religious or the invisible web of society, then we see that everything it touches the body - drawing, color, crown, tiara, dress, uniform-all that makes reaching its full development under a sensitive and colorful, utopias sealed in the body.

But perhaps that would once again fall under the dress, perhaps should achieve the same flesh, and then would be that in some cases, the breaking point, it is the body that turns against its own utopian power and brings in all the space of religion and the sacred, the entire space of the other world, all counterworld space, inside same space that is reserved. Then the body in its materiality, in the flesh, would be the product of his own fantasies. After all, does the dancer's body is not just a lengthy body as a whole space that is inside and outside at once? And the drugs, and the possessed, the possessed, whose body becomes hell, the stigmatized, whose body becomes suffering, redemption and salvation, bloody paradise.

really was stupid, just now, to believe that the body never was elsewhere, it was a hopeless here, and that he opposed any utopia.

My body, in fact, is always on the other hand, is linked to all other parts of the world, and indeed it is elsewhere in the world. Because it around where things are arranged, it is about him and about him as against a sovereign, as there is over a below Right, left, forward, one back, a near a remote. The body is the zero point of the world, where roads and spaces are to cross, the body is not anywhere: in the heart of the world is that small core from which utopian dream, speak, express, guess, perceive things in place and also refuse for an indefinite power of utopias imagined. My body is like Sun City, has no place but come out and radiate it all possible places, real or utopian.

After all, children take a long time know that they have a body. For months, for over a year, have only a sparse body, limbs, cavities, holes, and all this is organized, none of this is embodied literally but in mirror image. In an even stranger way, Homer's Greeks had no word to describe the unity of the body. Paradoxical as it is in front of Troy, under the walls defended by Hector and his companions there was no body, had his arms raised, breasts were brave, agile legs had had shiny helmets over their heads: there was a body. The Greek word for body is not in Homer but to designate the body. It is this body, therefore, is the body and is the mirror who teach us (well, who taught Greeks and those who teach children now) that we have a body, that body has a form, that form has an outline, which at that boundary is a thick, weighing, in a word, the body takes place. It is the mirror and is the body which allocated a space to experience deep and original utopian the body is the mirror and is the body which are quiet and soothe and close on a close - which is now sealed to us, that great rage shattered utopian and volatilizes at every moment our body. It is thanks to them, is through the mirror and the body as our body is not outright utopia. If one thinks, however, that mirror image is hosted for us in an inaccessible space, which can never be where will our body, if you think that the mirror and the body are themselves in an invincible elsewhere, then found to be only a utopia can be enclosed on themselves and hide a profound moment of utopia and sovereign body.

Perhaps we should also say that making love is to feel your body that closes on itself, there is finally beyond utopia, with all its density, in the hands of another. Under the fingers of the other that they move over, all the invisible parts of your body will be put against the other's lips become sensitive yours in front of their eyes half shut your face becomes a certainty, there is finally a look to see your closed eyelids. Also love, like the mirror and like death, utopia soothes your body, the silences, calm, and seals it in a box, the closure and sealing. So it is a relative so close mirror of illusion and the threat of death, and if despite these two figures that surround dangerous one likes to make love so much is because, in love, the body is there.

1 The recovery of the body in the process of awakening is a recurring theme in the work of Marcel Proust. (Editor 's)

* The conference "The body utopian", 1966, the book integrates utopian body. heterotopias , emerging (ed. New Vision).

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