The Productive Body

by François Guéry, Didier Deleule, Philip Barnard (Translation)

The Productive Body asks how the human body and its labor have been expropriated and re-engineered through successive stages of capitalism; and how capitalism’s transformation of the body is related to the rise of scientific psychology and social science disciplines complicit with modern regimes of control. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault cited Guéry and Deleule in order to link Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism with his own critique of power/knowledge. The Productive Body brings together Marxism and theories of the body-machine for the goal of political revolution.

155 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Madelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Thus, beyond the project of total intelligibility of which it is a part, the theory of the body-machine appears as the recognition and exploitation of a new characteristic of life: life as conquest and domination of nature. And simultaneously, the body-machine incarnates the ruse in which a transfer of finality expels living beings from the project altogether. What emerges is the possibility of conceptualizing the productive body as the consequence of the breakdown of relations between man and nature; humanity smashing its way through nature, following a plan it can never quite figure out”

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anti- Oedipus without the edginess or wit, but as short as Anti- Oedipus should have been