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Aristotle distinguished between the body and the soul. The latter referred not only to the principle of life, but to the form of a particular living body. Thus the soul is the organization of the body. (cf. organism) Aristotle rejected the doctrine of the Pythogoreans, according to which the soul can clothe itself in different bodies. (see clothing/garment ) Instead, a particular soul is the entelechy, or formative force of a particular body, and the individuality of a particular man. Thus every particular soul requires a connection to a particular organic whole. At the same time, he upheld a division between matter and form which describes, for example, the relation between the eye and sight. When the power of sight is absent, the eye is no longer an eye in the proper sense. After taking the position that "..there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted on without involving the body," Aristotle goes on to suggest that thinking is the one specific activity of the human soul which is capable of separate and independent existence from any connection to the body. (see also subject )
Read MoreThe term "consensual hallucination" is Gibson's (from Neuromancer), who is generally credited with coining the term Cyberspace. "What seems so alluring about the half-formed promise of VR technologies is the ideal of a world of one's own that one can share with others through consensus but that one can enter or leave at will ... that brings with it a certain guarantee of pleasure without danger." (E. Grosz, Anybody)
Read MoreIs the cyborg an improved hybrid species that has the capacity to be humanity's evolutionary successor? This is the starting point for Manuel DeLanda's evocation of future "robot historians" writing the history of " War in the Age of Intelligent Machines." Warfare has been the primary arena for the technological development of cybernetics, but the cyborg has become a figure that brings toget her science fiction and technology in unexpected combinations. If the Terminator and Robocop exemplify some of the issues of aggression for a masculine image of the cyborg in the contemporary imagination, the concept has been developed in a feminist perspective as well.
Read MoreIn the Anti-Oedipus, subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, volume 1, and first published in 1972, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari engaged in a radical critique of Freudianism. Like their contemporary, R.D. Laing, and like Wilhelm Reich before them, they linked psychic repression with social repression, and sought to recover the revolutionnary quality of desire.
Read MoreOn ne nait pas femme; on le devient -- Simone de Beavoir
At its simplest, the distinction between sex and gender is between a physical difference and a cultural difference. Gender is the mapping of socially and ideologically important distinctions onto biological differences between the sexes. (see also sexuality.)
The distinction between sex and gender becomes important in arguments that lean towards social constructionism, in which gender is given more attention, and is presumably more open to change, than sex. Feminism asserts that gender is a fundamental category within which meaning and value are assigned to everything in the world, a way of organizing human social relations. In a further twist on the relation between culture and nature, Brian Massumi calls gendering the process by which a body is socially determined to be determined by biology.
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