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Isaac Tylim introduced this very well-attended panel by noting the accessibility of the body—alive or dead, dismembered or decapitated—on the internet, the outcome of the late 20th century cyber-revolution. This apparent freedom of ‘the body-on-display’ seems to conceal, while revealing its opposite, namely the entrapment of the body in the jail of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. He asked the panelists to explore perverse manifestations of racism, homophobia, and misogyny in society and in the analytic process, to discuss the abhorrence of otherness—be it black/ Jewish, homosexual or female—as signifier of impurity and to examine its psycho-dynamic significance.
Tylim noted a kind of ‘freezing’ of the mental capacity to deal with differences. Racism, homophobia, and misogyny originate in the regressive pool towards the concrete of the material/biological substrata. The belief in racial supremacy implies a community of bodies that are biologically alike—Aryan, homosexual, or women in general. The panelists were asked to expand on the ‘biopolitics’ of the body and its impact on acceptance and/or rejection of differences. The new global ‘society of spectacle’ (Sontag) that denigrates reality and alters our conceptions of the ‘other’ as ‘other’ were to be addressed.
The first speaker, Janine Puget, stated that the body, ineffable and ungraspable, can only be known through re-presentation. At the same time, it is the most signifi-cant indicator of the irreducible differences among subjects. Subjects gradually construe shifting representations of their own bodies that do not originate only in themselves, but also in inherited family and social representations and in their relationship with and among others.
When coming into contact with another body, our body sets in motion a range of sensations, from pleasure to intrusion (violations) as well as the feeling of fear or terror of physical contact. Because at times those qualities that denote the presence of another body tri