Metamorphoses of the Body

by José Gil, Stephen Muecke (Translator)

Book by Gil, Jose

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

José Gil (Muecate, Moçambique, 15 de junho de 1939) é um filósofo, ensaísta e professor universitário português.

Nascido em Muecate, Moçambique, estudou Matemática, na Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, antes de partir para França. Licenciou-se em Filosofia, pela Universidade de Paris, em 1968. Um ano depois obteve o grau de mestre com uma tese sobre a moral de Immanuel Kant. Iniciou a sua carreira como professor do ensino secundário.

José Gil foi considerado pelo semanário francês Le Nouvel Observateur, um dos 25 grandes pensadores do mundo.

Reviews

[Peter N.]

yyyeeeaaahhh basically I thought he was a racist old git. Like I thought it would be interesting because at the moment I'm into stuff about the body that goes beyond simplistic semiotic theory ("the body as social symbol" etc), also I really like the translator, Stephen Muecke, and he's put some of Gil's concepts to good use in his own work. But I read the first 20 pages or so and realised I was making a terrible mistake. He kept chugging away at his dichotomy between "modern" versus "traditional" societies on the basis of some fluffy disembedded metaphysical dick-pulling without even making a vague gesture of justifying that distinction on ethical or political terms. Why should I give two shits about his nuanced metaphysics of time if that metaphysics systematically relies on us all assuming that the peoples of the Third World "don't have history"? And I mean, he was writing this in France in the mid-eighties, so surely he is to some degree familiar with the collapse of historical metanarratives, Western colonial dualisms, etc. - you'd think he'd manage a passing mention of these critiques at the very least. So I thought the book was not just ethically problematic, but theoretically bald.

Sometime in the future I might be desperate and bored enough to plod through and salvage what I can, but definitely not for a while...