Book Review

Let me begin with a moment of vacillation between the body and the flesh. What is a body, of itself and for itself? What is the flesh, of itself and for itself? Whence and how does this differentiation arise? Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy, two philosophers whose thinking has intersected previously around the overcoming of meta-physics and the possibility of radical freedom, would seem to meet once again as they seek to address this difficult cluster of questions (see Agamben, 1993, 1998; Nancy, 1991; see also Elliott, 2011). Since, in recent years, collections of their occasional writings seem to have proliferated, sometimes combining the most disparate essays, I will focus primarily on just two of these, Nancy’s ‘Noli me tangere’ and Agamben’s ‘Nudities’. What these two very substantial essays – which lend their titles to the collections in which each is found – share is the juxtaposition of bodies and words, one seeking to advance thereby a deconstruction of Christianity and the other the stripping of the body bare of all remaining Christian cloak. The body has long been a subject of philosophical reflection, but, over the century between the announcements of the death of God and the death of Man, it has become a more visible matter of philosophi-cal concern and equally important to social and political theory. The reasons for such intensification are complex and, as Agamben’s and Nancy’s two essays illustrate, coming to terms with such complexity is fraught with difficulties. On the one hand, the body seems to have become an increasingly important site in the organization and deployment of power, social and political, but it would seem that the condition of possibility for such organization and deployment i