Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXIII • Številka/Number 2 • 2002 • 7-8 
THE BODY/LE CORPS/DER KÖRPER 
This special issue of FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK/ACTA PHILOSOPHICA entitled 
THE BODY/LE CORPS/DER KÖRPER leads the reader through a philo-
sophical and interdisciplinary (art, cultural and political) re-consideration of 
the paradigm of the body. The development of various forms of observation 
in space in connection with very special forms of human perception has ef-
faced the duality of body and mind, science and technology. With the aid of 
the new media technologies (from electronic to multimedia), the viewer may 
enter h is /her own body. Technology allows the turning of the body into vari-
ous spectacles and views by means of prosthetic extensions. In the past, mi-
croscopes and telescopes extended human perception away from the body, 
towards the infinite and infinitesimal, while in the 21st century, one's own 
body has become the object of research, a place for bio-genetic manipula-
tions, the base for prosthetic connections and a field of intensive research on 
subjectivity, agency and consciousness. 
The perspective from which the writers were asked for their generous 
contributions to this special issue of FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK is not that of a 
range of opinions, but a radicalisation of the notion of the body, a political 
reading of it, a political perspective of the body in relation to processes of 
globalisation, subjectivity and agency, in the fields of philosophy, theory, art, 
culture, science and history. Processes of the technologization of the world 
and of the human that are transforming the co-ordinates of political reality 
today are brought into tight focus. This process involves a tension between 
the international nature of the electronic and digital gaze and corporeal re-
alities, memory, history, genetics, machine intelligence and the bio-technical 
recombination of human and non-human DNA. 
This is also a call for a radical re-articulation of the technological, medi-
ated and digitised within political philosophy and theory. In an ecstatic exag-
geration of Merleau Ponty's phenomenological model, world and body com-
prise a continual feedback loop, producing a terminal identity without the 
MARINA GRZINIC MAUHLER 
terminal. On the other hand, contemporaneity is fostering the disembodiment 
of the subject within new media technologies, opening crucial questions re-
garding the politics of representation and the semiotics of the articulation of 
different bodies in different spaces. Last but not least, we have to fur ther 
push the implication concerning specific representational strategies that fo-
cus on the human body, which means that we have to develop and analyses 
systems and paradigms, structures and matrices of representations of histori-
cally, gender and class-determined bodies. 
The relationship between the body and the machine opens an array of 
epistemological questions from cyborg identity to cyberfeminist agency, 
through a body seen as nothingness, or an angel or a piece of shit. Different 
embodiments are a contested territory for post-colonial research on the body 
and the visual within and against the Capitalist machine, (post)feminist con-
testation of agency/imaginary and a psychoanalytic re-articulation of parts of 
the body (gaze, breast, voice) as a threshold between reality/virtuality/the 
real. 
I would like to thank all the contributors for their excellent papers and col-
laboration. 
Marina Grzinic Mauhler, Issue Editor 
Ljubljana, April 2002 
8