Conclusion: Desire and Embodiment

Abstract

Throughout the book I have made reference to ways in which the body is affected by desire. By means of conclusion, I want to focus on this issue, in particular, in order to attend to the ways in which the body and desire work together to figure desire as movement. In her work on ‘embodiment and moving image culture’, Vivian Sobchack reminds us not only of the vast amount of work done in contemporary theory on ‘the body’, but also that ‘we matter and we mean through processes and logics of sense-making that owe as much to our carnal existence as they do to our conscious thought’ (2004, 4). The distinction Sobchack draws between ‘carnal existence’ and ‘conscious thought’ seems apt in a theorisation of desire and this book has admittedly focused more on the thought than the carnality, but, as Sobchack points out, we owe both for our ability to make sense and to make meaning. We also need to avoid falling into an opposition between mind and body and instead move towards thinking about how the two function together, particularly in terms of what desire does.