Kroppen som form

Abstract

The article takes as its departure the fact that the word form is commonly used, in everyday language as well as in scientific discourse, when discussing the body. Within the philosophical tradition the concept of form has been used in more specific and elaborate ways. Alm wishes to explore the possibilities of the concept as an analytic instrument, specifically as a means of critically approaching the discourse of the body conceptualised by dichotomies such as: body versus psyche, biology versus culture, interiör versus exteriör, subject versus object etc. The focus of the article is the ambiguity of the concept of form as presented in Aristotle: at the same time denoting a thing's inner principle, that which makes a thing what it is, and it's outer shape, the contour. With a brief introduction to the Aristotelian concept of form, and an excursion on Judith Butler's reinterpretation of Aristotle's theories of form and matter (in Bodies that Matter 1993), Alm presents a series of suggestions as to how the ambiguous concept of form might be applied to the discourse of the body. If, as Aristotle suggests, inner form cannot be separated from outer form (on account of the fact that form cannot be separated from matter in the materialised entity), then the concept of form might be used when critiquing the separation of, for example, body and psyche, identity and deed, biology and culture. Combined with the suggestion that form has an ontological and an epistemological function and these two aspects cannot be separated from one another, put forward by Aristotle and taken to heart by Butler, the idea of the body as form might prove useful in conceptualisingthe sexed bodyassituated inthe junction between biology and culture, enmeshed in practices and discourses of language, knowledge and moral.