The New Flesh
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In this thesis, I interrogate the mind/body split that has been perpetuated by the western philosophical tradition. Through Julia Kristeva’s abjection concept and Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs, I analyze body horror as a genre indicative of a dualism that attempts to ignore the primacy of the body. I take David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive as examples of the mind assuming willful primacy. I then study Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as an example of hyperregulation of the body. Finally, I turn to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Crimes of the Future and find, in the latter film, a Deleuzian instance of allowing the body to transform in relation to a changing environment. Cronenberg’s vision of body horror subverts the genre by locating futurity in the changing body. What emerges is both engaged with and critical of posthumanism: a novel suggestion for the relationship between body, mind, and world.
Source: Washington State University
DOI: 10.7273/000008727
Author: Blevins, Mathilda
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225643789
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