The Emergent Body: Marxism,Critical Realism and the Corporeal in Contemporary Capitalist Society

This article employs critical realism to reflect on two views of the body found within Marxism. It is argued that the first view—that of the body as simple prerequisite—found within the 1844 Manuscripts should be rejected due to a latent idealism and residual dualisms that render the body under-theorised, ontologically primitive and in limbo. It is then argued that the second view—that of the thinking body—introduced within The German Ideology would be strengthened further by using critical realism in an underlabouring role to reconceptualise the body-in-general as emergent so as to recognise more fully the paradoxical situation in which humans both are and have bodies. This conceptualisation would help both to aid the perception or actuality of a reductionist position and to acknowledge fully the stratified nature of human beings. In so doing, it is argued that, once there is a move back towards the concrete, such a theory of the body is able to inform more insightful analyses of the ways in which the body is (re)produced in a society in which biological space, as well as geographical and social spaces, is being infiltrated and colonised by a capitalist logic.