Now for the Phenomenology of Embodiement and Ensoulment

Now that I've hashed on Marx just a bit I'll take a moment to jot a thought on what this other paper I'm supposed to write is actually about (I must admit that when I started this blog I really didn't intend to make it all about my papers but at least I get it out of my system and don't encourage my wife's homicidal tendencies with my constant obsessing about papers that for some reason I never explain to her in sufficient detail but instead just ramble about and use as pity ploys when I've convinced myself that the end is swiftly approaching). I love long sentences.
I'm trying to focus in on the persistence of a view of mind (or soul) and body that sees them as seperate, that sees the individual as an embodied soul or an ensouled body, through the middle English "Debate of Body and Soul" and Thomas Aquinas's commentary to Aristotle's De Anima. The real focus here is the difficulty of maintaining the model that Aristotle posits which presents the soul as the formal element of the individual and the body as potentiality (the soul could then also be though as actuality).

What makes the "Debate of Body and Soul" useful for opening up these issues is the problematic nature of the texts premise of a split between the Body and Soul for them to confront one another in debate at all. Resultantly what is portrayed is a surprisingly fleshly soul and a peculiarly soulful body.

Of course there is every likelihood that I may through all of this right out of the window in favor of simply trying to sort out what exactly is going on in the account that Aristotle and Aquinas are trying to give us. With an assist from Nussbaum et al I think I could probably pull off a paper doing some close readings of some of the more troublesome places in the literature.

Arundhati Roy and Marxist Post-Colonialism

The current project here is to attempt to come to terms with the function of ideology in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. I've got a couple of ideas of how I can come at this. One is to trace the presence of violence and its connections to various ideologies in the novel. One of the prime examples is the "History House" located in the "Heart of Darkness" with its accompanying spirit of Kari Saipu the pedophilic representative of colonialism.
A second question is whether or not there is any interface between the ideology and practices of colonial rule and the brutal punishment for the transgression of Ammu and Velutha against an Indian cultural imperative. The chief of police seems to play a strange double of Pontius Pilate. He at once represents an authority that seems to mimic the functioning of the former colonial system in its relation to the workers and especially untouchables, yet at the same time he is not entirely seperate from the demands for the traditional order voiced by Baby Kochamma and Mammachi.

Finaly, there is the ambigous relation between the narrator and Indian culture. The narrative at once mourns the prostitution of the art of the Kathakali dancers, and takes a very Western stance concerning the place of the individual in society, emphazing personal choice and freedom in the face of the condemnation and violent reprisals of the traditional cultural order.