The economy of the body in a post-Nietzschean era

Jeffner Allen

pp. 289-307

in: John Sallis, Giuseppina Moneta, Jacques Taminiaux (eds), The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, the first ten years, Berlin, Springer, 1988

Abstract

Since Nietzsche's aphorism "The Madman,' the question of embodiment has stood, albeit uneasily, on the philosophical horizon. If God is dead, what is the status of his murderer, the human subject? If God, the totality of codes that constitute Western metaphysics, no longer exists, must not the human subject, that complex of mind, body and desire, have died at the same time? To be sure, for Nietzsche, it is we who made the God that became the ideal of truth, goodness, and life-denying beauty. Yet it would be a hasty philosophical sleight of hand if we failed to note that we, the murderers of that ideal, are implicated in the subsequent, fundamental shift of all structures of meaning.