This is their body

How has the body acquired such importance in the definition of contemporary identities? ? Mobilizing investigations into transplants, childbirth, or the relationship with corpses, Dominique Memmi reveals the social and political issues of this bodily anchoring of the self.

What do the bodies say about our time ? With Revenge of the flesh. Essay on new identity supportsDominique Memmi continues the ambitious reflection that she has been leading for many years on “ the body, in whole or in pieces » (p. 8). The work deals more particularly with identification processes which rely on the flesh to “ assign places and social identities ”, and analyzes the way in which we “ create legitimate identities » with a “ recourse to the body and nature » – through real social work that the author defines as a process “ of incarnation » (p. 11).

A work of incarnation

Unlike numerous works on identity – a notion with vague contours and delicate use in social sciences – the work focuses on “ less on those who are bearers of these identities (that is to say virtually on each of us) than on those who engage in this identification through incarnation » (p. 15). Dominique Memmi’s remarks are mastered, and identity understood as the product of social work to be objectified more than an essence or a quality. Thus, the reader will not find any digression on “ reality » of what we would be or the meaning of our affiliations. Revenge of the Flesh pursues an objective that is both more modest and more convincing: to trace how, and why, the body has today become the site of the subjects’ truth.

D. Memmi captures the concrete operations which produce this work of incarnation through various objects and terrains: the management of dead babies, embalming, adoption, transplantation, organ and gamete donation, treatment placenta, breastfeeding, bereavement, etc. The themes are numerous but this diversity never harms the subject, quite the contrary. Certainly, the reading sometimes betrays the relative degree of familiarity that the author maintains with such different objects, and the pages devoted to the most mastered areas are necessarily more detailed. The fact remains that by taking the risk of venturing into less expected themes, Dominique Memmi brilliantly organizes the data, references, observations or interviews (mostly from his own surveys), giving meaning to social logics often understood in isolation. Thus, for example, the author studies in the first part of the work the majority discourse on “ need » and the “ need » what the relatives of disaster victims feel about possessing, recovering or recomposing the bodies of the missing to carry out the “ mourning work » (chapter 2).

These remarks could have been the subject of an analysis in themselves, in order to study the emergence of contemporary forms of expression of grief or the professional interventions which make psychological care necessary. But by putting other social dynamics into perspective, such as the recent emergence of a “ right to origins » in the world of adoption (chapters 6 and 13) or the symbolic investment of the placenta in certain practices « alternatives » of childbirth (chapter 5), Dominique Memmi’s reflection takes on additional scope. Each analysis is nourished by a beneficial echo. The work of mourning, the right to origins or the placenta then appear as demonstrations local more general trends – certainly refined by the specific knowledge and practices which surround each of the objects. These practices and these discourses are understood more as the translation of a “ government by the flesh » (p. 261 et seq.), which – succeeding that “ by speech » to which Memmi had already devoted Make live and let die – prefers the “ concreteness of bodies » to regulate behavior and construct identities. Backed by psychologizing and normative representations of the good, the good, but also the obligatory and the necessary, this biopolitics is deployed through management of the body, its exposure and the biological knowledge about life and the living that accompanies it. .

The first part of the work – “ reincarnation of the living and the dead » – deals with disappearance, mourning, transplants, birth and filiation. Dominique Memmi is interested in social investments at the margins of life ; the liminality of the beginning, the end and the indetermination has generated a multiplicity of discourses and practices, professional and profane, which enact normal and desirable behavior, and determine the expected management of bodies. A mother bereaved by the disappearance of her baby feels, expresses and acts in a specific and standardized way, and desires (or says she desires) to preserve tangible memories of the child ; a patient testifies to having incorporated a donor graft as a piece that is both foreign and non-intrusive of a body that he only partly makes his own ; a woman giving birth under » leaves identifying traces accessible one day to the child she entrusts to the State, marking the tenuous but irrevocable existence of the biological link which unites him to “ her » baby… These diverse manifestations reveal the importance given to the flesh as a material through which individuals think of themselves and assign identities. Certainly, giving meaning to blood, muscle, organ, or gene is not in itself a new phenomenon. But thinking of the body, through the administration of life and death, as the place from which a “ undertaking of refoundation of the subject » (p. 81) conversely demonstrates a notable biopolitical evolution.

The second part, “ The entrepreneurs of the reform », then brings together five chapters on the work of incarnation. If, on several occasions in the work, Dominique Memmi takes care to recall that the developments studied are part of a “ mood of the time » (p. 217) which makes any mechanistic interpretation unsatisfactory, the author never abandons the explanatory vocation of sociological objectification. She has a particular interest in the agents who intervene on the body and the subjects. These forms of intervention are observed first as a professional activity, and Dominique Memmi devotes fascinating pages to the professions of the psyche (on mourning and its support, chapter 8), but also to the dissemination of this knowledge – or rather of its vulgate – in other professional bodies, such as midwives or embalmers (chapter 10).

However, these agents are less seen as the promoters of a new relationship to identity than their revealers. And Dominique Memmi specifies that “ psychologists, caregivers or funeral agents evolve in the same socio-cultural context as the public with which they are confronted and whose expectations they strive to translate ; from this point of view the sensitivity that they express with particular acuity could well reflect a more diffuse unease » (p. 191). This unease is due, in part, to an ambiguous relationship with nature and the way in which we refer to it. According to the author, we “ never stops mimicking nature to give added legitimacy to what (we are) doing » ; this work, which she calls a “ naturalism in action », runs through the discourse and practices of professionals as much as the public they support. And we then understand why and how the flesh, perceived as the substrate “ natural “, given and biological to our existence, is seized (and designated) as the very foundation of our identities.

A desire for eternity

The last fifty pages of the book present “ A great placental reverie », where Dominique Memmi offers particularly stimulating analyzes on the work of incarnation and what it says about our time. The author, relying in particular on the work of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault (but also Nikolas Rose, Giorgio Agamben or Cars Wouters), shows here the full political scope of her work. For Memmi, and this is the meaning of this “ placental daydream “, we (subjects, professionals, public…) would maintain a relationship “ melancholy » to the world, « a vagueness in the soul inspired by the transience or the vanity of existence, a gloom in the face of the inexorable course of time, synonymous with death and separation » (p. 250). Nature – its idea, in fact – appears to us stable, permanent and solid. It then becomes a resource by allowing “ to suspend time: to naturalize is to essentialize a reality by denying history » (ibid.).

Dominique Memmi suggests that our current relationship with flesh and nature comes from “ faintness » aroused by the process of individuation which, and in particular since “ the big break of the 1960s-1970s ”, would have disrupted the bond uniting us to others (p. 265). We, contemporaries, eminently liberal, have thus become subjects of choice for reformers who seek to re-anchor us in a (corporeal) destiny that the celebration of choice and autonomy makes more difficult to understand. And the author concludes as to the responsibility of professionals (reformers) in these developments, true “ surprise at (his) work » (p. 278). Nurses, psychologists, social work assistants, midwives… For her, these agents “ find a nerve center to sense, interpret, then precipitate change » (p. 279). But above all, they have a superbly effective tool for action and theorizing: the psyche (p. 280), which we (and they) represent as constructed and seated on a bodily substrate that is always already given. . They act by the government of souls (as Nikolas Rose would say), but also by the enactment of what souls must feel, think, say, express because they are – in their own way – also determined by the materiality of our body.

Revenge of the flesh is a work that matters. With great mastery, he produces the jubilation of great books when reading. Both modest and humble in his writing, always careful to base his arguments on meticulous empirical work, Dominique Memmi offers a book built around a true thesis, capable of giving meaning to experiences often grasped in isolation, and to grant a little more intelligibility to experiences that are nevertheless so delicate to analyze. We could discuss certain propositions (in particular the notion of melancholy, both seductive and indefinite), or certain theoretical choices (why, in particular, have we passed so much silence on feminist work which is interested in the flesh and affectivity? ?). But these biases are precisely the mark of personal proposals and of a living social science which nourishes thought. Dominique Memmi thus signs a landmark work, and which reminds us that the social sciences, as a scientific and political project, not only allow us to understand ourselves, as “ self and others » – these governed subjects – but also, more broadly, to grasp the logic of our era and our times.