Foreign Bodies analyzes how our culture elaborates for us the bodies we have by natural evolution. Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us.

Part one The Force of the Body; Chapter 1 The Competent Body; Chapter 2 Orchids and Muscles; Chapter 3 Bodies Our Own; Part two The Pleasure and the Pain; Chapter 4 The Subjectification of the Body; Chapter 5 The Insistence on Correspondence; Chapter 6 These Alien Feelings That Are Our Own; Part three The Libidinal Economy; Chapter 7 Hard Currency; Chapter 8 Fluid Economy; Chapter 9 Strange Lusts That Are Our Own; Part four Imperative Bodies; Chapter 10 Imperative Surfaces; Chapter 11 Elemental Bodies; Chapter 12 Foreign Bodies;