No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The question of what constitutes, indeed what is meant by, bodily integrity is one that readers of Body & Society will find implicitly at the forefront of many articles published in the journal, and especially those in this special section. Where once the apparent truth of the Cartesian body as the unified and fundamentally unchanging material base of continuing existence could be taken for granted, the development of both contemporary biosciences and postconventional modes of theoretical inquiry have radically undone that illusory certainty. In particular the emergence of phenomenology, as a potent explanatory model that closes the conceptual gap between mind and body to focus on the experience of embodiment, has opened up new areas of concern. Those concerns engage with the affective significance of both external issues such as the conventional understanding of prostheses, and the more visceral experience of organ transplantation, although I would be wary of making any firm distinction between the exteriority and interiority of bodily being. Broadly speaking, the issue to hand is not simply that of body modification where a certain obeisance to corporeal integrity remains, but that of the insistent potential of radically