A Body Worth Having?

Abstract

Is the body the vessel which holds the true self locked within it? Is the skin the frontier between 'inside' and 'outside'? What in man is the capsule, and what the encapsulated? (Norbert Elias, The History of Manners)The Body is Not a Defensible Boundary When John Locke famously avowed in The Second Treatise on Government [1689] that: 'Every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any right to but himself' (II § 27), he established a philosophical axiom that affirmed the rights of citizens. From the Lockean perspective -a perspective which has profoundly informed much discussion about political and economic rights since then -we enter into the public domain as owners of our bodies and the labor of those bodies and this property-in-ourselves cannot be taken from us without due process of law. Indeed, according to Locke, the right to own property itself derives from this fundamental proprietary self relation: 'though the things of nature are given in common, yet man, by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it, had still in himself the great foundation of property' (II § 44). In so far as they incorporate this Lockean perspective, our legal and economic notions of individualism and individual rights (such as the right to property) rest on the premise that as embodied persons we possess ourselves. 1 It seems a simple enough formula: to be a (legal) person means to have a body. 2 Starting from this proprietary premise, we derive the most basic concepts that organize our political and economic lives. For example, our prevailing notions of freedom, on the one hand, or wage labor, on the other, both owe their significance to Locke's seminal formulation. Framing our most basic forms of social and personal engagement, these concepts saturate our self-understanding about how we live, both as humans among other humans and as organisms in the world. Indeed, the imaginary