"The Body"

The idea of The Body is curiously enough a product of the age of the masses. Like the defining metonym of the factory hand, theThe Body functioned and indeed still functions metonymically as the pars pro toto. Its mode of abstraction from the material multiplicty of actual bodies is in this rather novel: it no longer belongs to the species, but to the general expressed in the individual, but an individuaity stripped of its specificity in order to reveal, in its unity, the in-difference of the specific.

[There is a task worth undertaking to bring the biomechanics of Anson Rabinbach's The Human Motor together with the Adorno / Agamben theses on survival and bare life – the factory and the camp as poles of modernity as a historical period]