We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. The Women's Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked. -Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1984, 61.(onsider the central problem involved in examining eating disorders from an ethical or political perspective: On the one hand, as feminists, we want to recognize that the personal is political and that eating disorders cannot be explained at the level of individual pathology. An adequate account needs to address the social or ideological domain of representation that in some way helps produce such disorders. This recognition has led to the critique of a representational domain variously described as phallocentric, phallogocentric, or patriarchal. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to locate women as passive victims in some point of innocence outside representation. Thus, the task for feminists has been conceived of as constructing autonomous women's representations, and this task has appealed to an articulation of the female body. The body is, then, considered as that which has been belied, distorted, and imagined by a masculine representational logic. At the same time, the body has been targeted as the redemptive opening for a specifically feminine site of representation. In terms of eating disorders, this ambivalence surrounding representation might be cashed out as follows: the anorexic is the victim of representation, trapped in embodiment through stereotypical and alienating images -but at the same time only representation can cure this malaise; only a realistic, nonrepressive and less regulative form of representation will allow women to see themselves as autonomous subjects. We argue that this tension surrounding representation actually sustains the Cartesian mind/body dualism that it ostensibly criticizes. In what follows, we draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who has challenged the notion that reason or thought is the negation, repression, or ordering of some Here, feminism is not the other of thought, and this is so precisely because thought does not have an overarching identity, logic, or character (and therefore no privileged outside in general).Our argument turns around four main points: the current appeal to the body in opposition to a phallic logic is still cripplingly Cartesian; to locate the feminine (body) as some limit point beyond representation precludes an examination of the specific, practical, and historical techniques that regulate bodies; there is no mind/body relation in general that need characterize Western thought, but there is a series of practices and regimes in which bodies become; and, finally, an ethics that examines thought, discourse, and reason as themselves bodily events allows an understanding of eating disorders in terms of bodily activity rather than in terms of a repressed or negated "normal" body.
