The human body occupies a central place in our culture. From the veritable cult of the perfectly sculpted body to the trends of piercing, tattooing, and other modification, individuals claim the right to deal with their own bodies as they see fit. In the current debate about abortion, it is argued that the individual should control her own body.

The body as the object of control has Cartesian antecedents. While Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was not the first to separate the mind from the body, he was the first to separate the mind from the mechanistic natural world, of which the body is simply a part. In Descartes’ dualist system, the mind can not only overcome the epistemological limits of the body, but can also control, to some degree, the physical world. This could have had fascinating political implications had Descartes been interested in political philosophy. It is possible to imagine what a Cartesian political philosophy would look like by examining his writings, but we do not need to go to such lengths. One of Descartes’ contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), considered what he did not: individual bodies in society. Leviathan, the famous anthropomorphic metaphor for the state, bridges the gap between Descartes and Hobbes. These seventeenth-century notions of the body as the locus of control underlie and frame the way we talk about the body today.

While Descartes and his dualist legacy have been denigrated by many feminist thinkers, recent feminist scholarship recognizes the extent to which contemporary articulations of the body remain within a Cartesian framework, as is the case in the contemporary abortion debate. At the same time, recent investigations into Descartes’ dualism suggest that he was in fact much less “Cartesian” than we are led to believe. Perhaps, then, it would behoove us to re-examine Descartes and reintegrate him into a feminist genealogy of the body.