Abstract
The Cartesian mind–body dualism continues to shape the frames of its critique, especially within the unresolved debates around structure and agency, processes of socialisation, and the possibilities of autonomy and resistance. With the ideas of brain plasticity and autonomy of the body-matter within the sciences and the emergent discourses in the domain of cognitive sciences and ‘material feminism’ in the recent decades, the relationship between mind and body around the questions of agency and autonomy has become increasingly complicated. The scientific approaches to deconstruct human subjectivity through concepts indicating neural interconnections such as ‘neural maps’ and ‘mirror neurons’ continue to be inadequate. Aakash Singh Rathore, in his book, indicates the inherent limits of such scientific approaches in being able to access the physical body as lived and experienced, and the relationship between physical and non-physical self, or between flesh and spirit.
In a novel and needed digression, Rathore moves away from the scientific explanations of the subjective self which he sees as an abstraction regardless of their attempts at conveying concreteness and particularity in the understanding of human subjectivity. This work beautifully decentres the neural as the site of explaining the self and instead invokes the centrality of the flesh to understand the connections between mind and body and access the complicated dualisms in practice.
Intending such engagement, Rathore shifts his attention to a different site, that is, the genre of autobiographical writing. This in turn presents a fresh perspective to engage with the mind–body duality. According to the author, it is at the autobiographical site where lived experiences, providing the abstractions a material ground, suture together the spirit and flesh. The book looks at a diverse range of autobiographical literature from around the world, such as Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Gandhi), Waiting for a Visa (Ambedkar), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou), A Moveable Feast (Hemingway), Night (Wiesel), Baluta (Pawar), My Story (Das), Sun and Steel (Mishima), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Warhol), Maus (Spiegelman) and Persepolis (Satrapi). The titles of each chapter carry the defining identities which come through these 12 autobiographies, such as ‘The Crucified’, ‘The Mahatma’, ‘The Untouchable’, ‘The Nigger’, ‘The Boxer’, ‘The Survivor’, ‘The Dalit’, ‘The Poet’, ‘The Samurai’, ‘The Fake’, ‘The Mouse’ and ‘The Daughter’.
By focusing on autobiographies in its content and form, Rathore seeks to intervene in two related areas. Scrutinising the content, he explores how all these different authors represent their physical body in writing, how spirit and flesh are conjoined in the textual form of autobiographical writing. About the form itself, he tries to gauge a philosophy of these autobiographies. Rathore’s book seeks to complicate the neat boundaries of several dualisms that appear in engagement with the life of the mind. Located within the sparse literature on philosophy of autobiography and philosophy of mind, he argues that while these philosophical strands deal with the ideas of consciousness, brain, narratives, self in the construction of personhood, the discussion on the fleshly body is starkly missing. Therefore, he looks at these autobiographies where representation of the physical body forms one of the core elements of experimentation and navigation of truth. Trying to reflect on the commonalities in all the 12 works, he observes that they are in a way ‘experiments in agentive self creation’. (p. 138) Furthermore, the author notes that the concerns of the perception of the physicality and the presentation of the self, the representation of the body appear universally in autobiographical writing.
Content-wise, one of the most significant aspects of the book is the way it deals with these social identity markers such as Nigger, Dalit, Survivor, Fake, Mahatma and the rest. Before delving into the discussion of these 12 texts the author refers to Judith Butler’s idea of performance and corporeality of gender. It is through this that the author makes a departure to explore whether such a notion of performance can be helpful to understand these identities as well. Throughout these chapters, the author explores how all of these words, markers of their social location were inscribed in their flesh, and how the self of these authors kept returning through their writing to their physical body. The physical body and its representation becomes the site through which the authors understand the self and the other. This book thus makes a significant contribution by bringing the physical and the written, the body and the text, into an inescapable dialogue.
The merit of the book also lies in the fact that while it tries to engage with the broader ideas of the interrelationships between mind, spirit and body, the individual chapters engage with specific manifestations of certain dominant dualities, such as the assumed opposition of art and action (Mishima), fact and fiction (Hemingway, Warhol), mind and muscle, and more.
The book speaks in a crisp and accessible language to a broad audience. The author vocalises his presence in his writing style. While the chapters can be categorised into different genres and themes, such as philosophical autobiography, autobiographies of self-experimentation, literary autobiography, other genres such as graphic novel, documentation of tragedy and injustice and subsequent spiritual overcoming—they flow well from one to the next, making it an engaging read.
The nature of the book simultaneously allows for its potentiality as well as limits. Situated as a philosophical work, this book, with its various engagements, seeks readership across disciplines of philosophy, literature, gender studies, political philosophy, media, popular culture, social exclusion, and race and discrimination studies. As the book engages with a diverse field of literature in a limited space, a more thorough engagement with particular ideas is restricted, and themes swiftly shift from one to another. However, the same implicates its relevance in vast and varying areas of interest.