The figure of the human body and notions of its sustenance, wellbeing and need for change are central, if often latent, within discussions of contemporary eco-social 'crises'. This dissertation considers cycling practices in Los Angeles as a 'case' to ask how conceptions of human bodies - the intertwined ideas and materials that constitute them - need reconsidering. Cycling, particularly when replacing car journeys, is increasingly promoted as a solution for some of these 'crises': Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, traffic congestion and alleviating health concerns associated with sedentary lifestyles and mental health. Much cycling advocacy and research is focused on improving the cycling experience and enhancing rates of cycling in cities, yet rests on dominant ontological presumptions around human bodies, their categories of identity and their normativity - both what is considered 'normal' as well as aspirations of 'good' in terms of health and sustainability. In this dissertation, I work through a methodology of 'riding theory' by bringing together (material) feminist, queer and critical race theories with multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork on cycling practices, focusing mainly on Los Angeles, California. Rather than building on automatic assumptions of cycling as a 'solution', I ask in what ways cycling practices manifest through relations of power. This rests on an ontology of 'flesh' and 'enfleshment' - indebted to the work of corporeal and black feminist theorists - whereby cycling is understood not as modulated by relations of power, but becoming-as and through these relations in highly uneven ways. Through cycling in Los Angeles, intertwined techniques of power are discussed as: categorization (the naming and reproduction of identities and bodily difference); configuration of matter and meanings through spacetime (the configuration and affordances of cycling lungs, exposures, taking up spacetimes, speeds and locomotion) and valuation (the enrolment of cycling subjectivities and energies within the reproduction and circulation of value). As opposed to cycling futures reconfigured to fulfil alternative criteria of valuation, I consider what a cycling ethic of response-ability might do: An ethic that arises from the ontologies of enfleshment and that requires a working-with the affordances of cycling. Thinking through these ontologies and/as ethics, I argue, forces emergent reconsideration of how cycling subjectivities and responsibilities, justice, health and sustainability are understood.

Comme l’indique le titre de cette étude, notre travail se situe dans le prolongement de celui de Franck, et plus précisément de sa thèse déployée dans son livre, Chair et Corps : sur la phénoménologie de Husserl. Dans ce livre, Franck a démontré clairement le fondement dernier de la phénoménologie de Husserl, en disant que dans la mesure où la chair est définie par Husserl comme « auto-affection pure », cette chair ne peut pas se constituer comme un corps. Notre travail est un essai pour éprouver la phénoménologie de Henry, à partir de cette objection adressée à Husserl par Franck : l’impossibilité de l’incorporation de la chair. Notre question est donc la suivante : comment l’incorporation est-elle possible pour Henry, dans la mesure où, pour lui, l’auto-affection de la chair est pure. Notre travail sera conduit par cette seule question. Cependant, ce dont il s’agit ici ne peut pas être une simple interprétation de la philosophie de Henry. S’il est vrai que la phénoménologie de Husserl est un essai qui, en désirant « la phénoménologie comme science rigoureuse », cherche le fondement indiscutable de la philosophie, notre question touche ce fondement même, c’est-à-dire, le commencement de la philosophie. Lorsque nous interrogeons Henry sur le problème auquel est conduit inévitablement Husserl, cela nous conduit à poser la question du fondement dernier de la philosophie, à savoir, la question de son commencement qui, à vrai dire, est un commencement qui a toujours et déjà commencé. / As like the title of this study, our work is a continuation of the Franck’s work, specifically, which he deployed in his book Flesh and body : on the phenomenology of Husserl. In his analysis on the phenomenology of Husserl, Franck demonstrates that the flesh cannot be embodied, if it is defined as “pure auto-affection.” Our work expands on this thesis : the impossibility of emboyding the flesh, and attempts to examine the phenomenology of Michel Henry. The most important question is : how can Michel Henry explain an embodiment of flesh to the extent that he defines the flesh as pure auto-affection. However, what is involved here cannot be a simple interpretation of the Henry’s philosophy. While it is true that Husserl’s phenomenology is a test that, desiring "phenomenology as rigorous science", seeks the indisputable foundation of philosophy, we are asking for this foundation of philosophy that means the beginning of philosophy, when we ask Henry about the problem which inevitably leads Husserl. So, our question is the ultimate foundation of philosophy, the question of its beginning which, indeed, is a beginning that has always already begun.

Notre thèse présente le résultat de l’étude de quelques aspects de la phénoménologie, interprétés à travers l’œuvre de Merleau-Ponty servant de clef de lecture pour comprendre l’actuel développement biopolitique. L’étude est dirigée par la conviction selon laquelle, si chaque époque a sa préoccupation dominante propre, au cours des quarante dernières années l’irruption de la « vie », du bios, comme problème est venue agiter notre présent, devenant de plus en plus l’objet d’un savoir ample et précis. Cet aspect qui est devenu typique de notre époque est aujourd’hui communément désigné sous le nom de « biopolitique ». Toutefois, bien qu’il soit devenu central dans la réflexion contemporaine, la variété des acceptions conférées au terme « biopolitique » font émerger le fait qu’aucune unité de signification ne correspond à cette notion. C’est là le point de départ de notre travail, au croisement de la phénoménologie et de la biopolitique. Que signifie « vie » ? A quelles conditions serions-nous aptes à parler de « corps vivant » ? Qu’est-ce qui permet la naissance d’une « communauté » ? Voici quelques-unes des questions implicites qu’une lecture phénoménologique de la biopolitique devrait poser, en indiquant ce sans quoi cela n’aurait aucun sens de parler de vie, de corps, de communauté. / This dissertation investigates certain aspects of phenomenology from the point of view of Merleau-Ponty’s work, taken as a key to understand the current development in biopolitics. The investigation is guided by the following conviction: if it is true that each epoch has its dominant concern, then, over the past four decades, “life,” bios, has shaken our present, becoming the subject of an increasingly extensive and detailed knowledge. This character of our epoch has become known as “biopolitics.” Though crucial to contemporary thought, the variety of meanings conferred to the term “biopolitics” shows that it is not a unified notion. Here begins the present investigation, at intersection of phenomenology and biopolitics. What does “life” mean? In what ways are we willing to talk about a “lived body?” What generates a community? These are the questions that a phenomenological reading of biopolitics must ask, indicating that without which it would have no sense to talk about life, body, and community.

La question du sujet. Question fondamentale qui constitue comme un fil rouge pour qui souhaite cheminer et s’orienter dans la pensée philosophique d’Emmanuel Levinas. S’orienter dans une pensée intempestive et toujours mouvante, qui se déplace et progresse comme le mouvement des vagues, continu et entraînant. Mouvement intime et constitutif d’une pensée puissante qui, depuis ses débuts jusqu’à son acmé, n’a cessé de porter, autant que d’être portée par elle, cette question abyssale du sujet. Interrogation vertigineuse, en effet, qui se double intimement d’une intense réflexion sur l’altérité et sur ses différentes modalités de signification, d’expression. L’un et l’autre, le sujet et l’altérité, tous deux participent d’un seul et même souffle, d’une seule et même geste philosophique que Levinas entend déplier patiemment depuis ses premières œuvres jusqu’à son maître-ouvrage, le plus aride par son style syncopé, le plus déroutant par son écriture cassée et le plus dérangeant, surtout, par sa radicalité éthique : Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974). Ouvrage de la maturité où s’élabore et se donne à voir page après page une nouvelle figure du sujet, à la fois extrêmement aboutie, taillée dans la roche, ciselée même et ô combien questionnante et soumise elle-même à vive controverse. Un sujet fragile - débarrassé de toute stance égologique, de toute assise substantielle - expatrié en somme, autant que faire se peut, de ses antiques terres et privilèges ontologiques. Une subjectivité éthique, précisément, que Levinas expose sous toutes ses coutures et dans ses moindres nervures et replis possibles ; une subjectivité autopsiée en quelque sorte, ouverte, comme malgré elle, sur l’énigmatique travail d’une altérité intime qui l’habite depuis toujours. / The question of the subject. A fundamental question which is like a red thread for those who want to talk and move in Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical thought. Move in an untimely and always moving thought that moves and progresses as wave motion, continuous and catchy. Intimate movement and constitutes a powerful thought that, from its inception to its peak, has stopped wearing as much as to be driven by it, the abyssal question of the subject. Querying dizzying, indeed, that intimately doubles intense reflection on otherness, both part of a single breath, a single philosophical movement that Levinas means unfold patiently for his early works to his master-piece, his most arid, confusing, broken and disturbing work, especially by its ethical radicalism writing syncopated style : Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence (1974). A work of maturity which is developed and gives page after page to see a new face of the subject, both extremely accomplished, carved into the rock and even chased oh questionnante and subjected itself to controversy. A fragile subject – free of any egological stance, of any substantial base – expatriate in short as far as possible, its ancient lands and ontological privilege. Ethical subjectivity is what Levinas precisely exposes in all its glory and in its lower ribs and possible downturns ; subjectivity autopsied somehow open, as in spite of itself, the enigmatic work of an intimate otherness that has always inhabited.

Being treated as a piece of meat has long been an issue around which feminist concerns regarding the representation of women and practices of cultural consumption coalesce. However, as the Humanities undergo a paradigm shift away from intrinsically privileging the human subject, this demands new consideration of how cultural figurations of meat can work to challenge the terms of the species border. This thesis offers close readings of contemporary film, literature, visual art, music and live performance produced between the late 1980s and the present day that stage carnal encounters with meat. I unite these figurations under the term ‘meaty bodies’, exploring how they question the supposedly self-evident line between the flesh that we are and the flesh that we may eat. Situating its theoretical approach within the tension between psychoanalytic and cultural theories of taboo and abjection and emerging ‘new materialist’ conceptualisations of matter, this thesis contributes to the project of disrupting the primacy of ‘the human’ and the workings of the species divide. The thesis begins by examining three cultural productions that humanise meat by using it to speak to themes of vulnerability, trauma and sexual desire respectively. The photographic series Perishables (Yolaçan, 2002–04), the live art performance My New York (Zhang, 2002) and the pornographic novella The Butcher (Reyes, 1988) utilise meat to speak to issues surrounding human embodiment. However, I suggest that this typically decouples meat from the animal body from which it derives. The thesis subsequently turns to four cultural productions that more directly engage with the violence inherent in the naturalisation of meat as animal body. Analysing the experimental text Diary of a Steak (Levy, 1997), the concept album One Pig (Herbert, 2011), the live art performance inthewrongplaceness (O’Reilly, 2004–09) and the feature film Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012), the thesis positions these cultural productions as a challenge to the species border through their attentiveness to contemporary issues surrounding meat consumption and production, including discussion of ‘meat panics’ such as the 1980s/1990s BSE crisis, the development of tissue-cultured meat and impending food scarcity. These close readings show that what I term a ‘carnal equivalence’ between human and animal flesh can be a powerful means of questioning the terms of the species border. Yet, in rendering their encounters with meat frequently difficult and strained, these cultural productions stage and generate ambivalence as integral to our relations with meat consumption and production in the contemporary moment. The thesis suggests that this uncertainty is indicative of a wider impasse within the Humanities, as the field seeks to decentralise ‘the human’ and the discourses that are invested in the continued dominance of this category, yet is still shaped by attachments and anxieties that render this move more difficult than may otherwise be supposed.

Comment le visage est-il devenu un organe, objet de don et de transplantation ? En partant de ce questionnement, cette thèse investit le milieu de celles et ceux qui ont porté et débattu des projets de transplantation faciale au cours des années 2000 et 2010 en France et au Royaume-Uni. Elle éclaire les conditions sociales selon lesquelles la transplantation faciale a été rendue acceptable, pour les patients opérés et les équipes chirurgicales, les coordinateurs du don d’organes et les proches des donneurs défunts qui permettent le prélèvement. L’enquête a impliqué un investissement approfondi de l’ensemble de la chaîne de la transplantation,reposant sur la collecte d’archives (scientifiques, institutionnelles, médiatiques), sur la réalisation d’entretiens (avec les chirurgiens, les patients, les acteurs du don d’organes et de la régulation médicale, les membres d’associations de personnes défigurées), ainsi que sur une ethnographie des services hospitaliers qui réalisent ces opérations (du bloc jusqu’aux réunions de service). En suivant au plus près ces acteurs, l’enquête éclaire les tensions quel’expérimentation révèle sur son passage.Cette recherche aborde la greffe comme un objet qui articule des questionnements au croisement des institutions, des mouvements associatifs et des expériences du don. La greffe du visage bouscule, tout d’abord, les prétentions des chirurgiens à s’autoréguler. La confrontation des équipes chirurgicales aux institutions sanitaires et éthiques, qui évaluent l’opportunité de cette expérimentation, révèle des rapports distincts à l’objectivité médicale e tà l’encadrement des pratiques hospitalières. L’émergence de la greffe du visage travaille,ensuite, les collectifs de personnes défigurées qui oscillent entre soutien au progrès médical et dénonciation de la chirurgie comme oppression. Les réactions des associations françaises et anglaises sont révélatrices de conceptions distinctes de la défiguration, et contribuent à façonner la trajectoire de la greffe du visage. La greffe du visage interroge, enfin, les conditions sociales de disponibilité des corps des défunts et les tensions à l’oeuvre dans la réception d’un don anonyme d’organes. Les patients greffés au visage sont soumis à une double contrainte qui peut-être vécue comme contradictoire : d’un côté, celle de remercier le donneur, de l’autre, celle de l’oublier pour accepter la greffe. La thèse révèle ainsi l’assemblage hétérogène, mais néanmoins cohérent, de ces niveaux d’analyse, qui est en jeu dans chaque déplacement d’une partie de corps d’une personne à une autre. Elle éclaire, en d’autres termes, ce que charrie la chair. / How has the face become an organ, object of donation and transplantation? Starting from thisquestioning, this thesis invests the environment of those who have carried facial transplantprojects, and those who have debated about them, during the years 2000 and 2010 in Franceand the United Kingdom. It illuminates the social conditions according to which facialtransplantation has been made acceptable, for transplanted patients and surgical teams, organdonation coordinators and relatives of deceased donors who allow the retrieval. The enquiryinvolved an in-depth investment of the whole chain of transplantation, based on the collectionof archives (scientific, institutional, media), on conducting interviews (with surgeons, patients,organ donation and medical regulation’s actors, members of associations of disfigured people),as well as doing an ethnography of hospital services that carry out these operations (from theoperating rooms to the service meetings). By closely following these actors, the surveyilluminates the tensions that experimentation reveals in its passage.This research addresses face transplant as an object that articulates questions at the crossroadsof institutions, social movements and experiences of donation. Face transplant upsets, first ofall, the claims of the surgeons to self-regulate. The confrontation of surgical teams with healthand ethical institutions, which evaluate the appropriateness of this experiment, reveals distinctrelationships to medical objectivity and to the supervision of hospital practices. The emergenceof face transplant, then, poses a challenge to the collectives of disfigured people who oscillatebetween support for medical progress and denunciation of surgery as oppression. The reactionsof the French and English associations are indicative of distinct conceptions of disfigurement,and help to shape the trajectory of face transplant. Lastly, face transplant questions the socialconditions of the dead bodies' availability and the tensions at work in the reception of ananonymous donation of organs. Transplanted patients are subject to a double constraint that canbe experienced as contradictory: on the one hand, that of thanking the donor, on the other, thatof forgetting the donor in order to accept the transplant. The thesis thus reveals theheterogeneous – and at the same time coherent – assembly of these levels of analysis, which isat stake every time a body part is transferred from one person to another. It illuminates, in otherwords, what the flesh carries.

La phénoménologie se consacre à l’apparaître de ce qui n’apparaît pas, enjeu de son application à la psychopathologie, préalable de toute thérapie, dans la perspective du Comprendre de ses précurseurs. La psychotraumatologie, domaine de la présente recherche, ne peut se contenter des explications et des représentations a priori, et pose la question de la rencontre, en raison de l’identité de situation de la possibilité victimaire. Cette rencontre ne peut se saisir, sans perdre de vue sa dimension d’énigme, qui est la garantie de son renouvellement nécessaire à la relation thérapeutique. Cette énigme, l’autre y participe, avec ce qu’il vit, sa chair, son style, son langage, et ne saurait être substituée par une dynamique de la pulsion, une recognition pure d’un corps-machine à information, un assemblage d’objets tout faits, avant d’en replacer la signification dans le courant de l’existence. Les victimes présentent en commun, cette paralysie de la vie, cette sècheresse des terres arides où se produit un commerce exclusif avec soi-même ; ce travail en évoque les parcours, dans la clinique quotidienne et ses rapports à la créativité. C’est là, la pertinence de la phénoménologie qui est philosophie, pour promouvoir le retour à l’être plus qu’au sujet, et se détacher des pensées dualistes, en peine dans leurs prolongements théoriques et pédagogiques. La victime, par le possible surgissement de sa chair, de son altérité, de son récit, au sens de Merleau-Ponty, Levinas et Ricoeur, recèle une phénoménalité en attente, contre les apparences, loin de toute complétude d’explications qui n’en sont pas. / Phenomenology studies the process of appearing of what does not appear, stake in applying to psychopathology, precondition to any therapy, according to the methods of understanding, elaborated by the figures of phenomenological thinking. Psychotraumatology, here the proper field of research, cannot manage only with a priorical representations and explanations, and must settle the issue of encounter, because falling as a victim remains everybody’s identical possibility, and refers to everyone’s situation in front of this possibility. This encounter cannot be apprehended as a mere matter of fact, without loosing sight of its essentially enigmatical dimension, in order to renew and forward the relation with the therapist. Part of this enigma are the other living experiences, flesh, style, linguistic expressions, and creativity, and they could be replaced neither by pulsionary dynamics, nor by a cognitive theorization based on the conception of body as a mere information-machine : i.e., by a system of ready-made objects and objective events – instead of setting back their meaning within the stream of the person’s lived-through existence. There is the point of appealing to phenomenology : to come back to being rather than to subjectivity ; and so, to leave aside all the dualistic schemes of thought, that cannot manage properly on theoretical and pedagogical ground. The suffering person, through the eventual coming forth of its flesh, of its alterity, and of its told story – as these concepts occur in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s, Levinas’ and Ricoeur’s phenomenological analyses – is full of a phenomenality, waiting for its manifestation, against every expectation, and very far from being sufficiently clarified by the so-called causal « explanations ».

This paper studies the perception of the Christian body during the second and third centuries CE. It engages with this question with the aid of early Christian literature from this time period, additionally containing a particular focus on how the Pauline theology of the body influenced later Christian bodily conceptions. By subjecting these works to a close reading and with the aid of an intertextual theory, this thesis attempts to ascertain whether this early Christian perception of the body was fractured in nature, and whether aspects of this division – if evident – can be derived from and ascribed to a Pauline influence. This thesis argues that corporeality was a particularly complex component within the early Christian faith, the fractured nature of which could be derived from the contrasting influences of prior Graeco-Roman and Jewish theologies. / Den här uppsatsen studerar den kristna uppfattningen av kroppen under 100- och 200-talet e.v.t. Den behandlar denna fråga med hjälp av tidig kristen litteratur från denna tidsperiod, och inbegriper utöver detta även ett särskilt fokus på hur den Paulinska teologin om kroppen påverkade senare kristna uppfattningar av det kroppsliga. Genom att utsätta dessa verk för en närläsning och med hjälp av en intertextuell teori  så försöker den här uppsatsen därmed att avgöra om denna tidiga kristna uppfattning av kroppen var motsägelsefull i sin natur, och huruvida aspekter av denna splittring – om synlig – kan härstamma från eller tillskrivas Paulinsk influens. Den här uppsatsen argumenterar för att kroppslighet var en särskilt komplex komponent inom den tidiga kristna tron, vars splittrade natur kan härstamma från de kontrasterande influenserna av tidigare grekisk-romerska och judiska teologier.

The diel locomotor activity patterns of wandering larvae in the flesh fly, Sarcophaga crassipalpis Macquart (Diptera: Sarcophagidae), were examined using a novel apparatus and shown to be primarily diurnal, but with a minority (37%) showing nocturnal activity. In response to the environmental stress of heat shock, a significantly larger proportion (72%) of the larvae became nocturnal. In comparison, adult circadian activity also was predominantly diurnal, but not correlated with the larval activity patterns. In addition, adult patterns showed age-related changes in entrainment and free running period. Finally, the phase of circadian-gated adult eclosion was shown to be entrained by a 3-day exposure to light-dark cycles delivered prior to pupariation, with the phase maintained throughout pupal-adult metamorphosis under constant dark conditions. These results demonstrate that environmental changes may have profound effects on the expression of 24-h activity patterns and circadian rhythms during different life stages throughout development.

Territoriality in the flesh fly Sarcophaga crassipalpis (Diptera: Sarcophagidae) is studied in the laboratory. In rectangular enclosures, male flies exhibit a lower tolerance (occupation of the same physical space) of same-sex conspecifics than do females. In circular arenas, male flies show significantly higher levels of spatial separation among themselves (as determined from nearest neighbour analyses) than do females: males show a slight tendency towards a uniform distribution, whereas females exhibit a slight tendency towards clustering. The male spatial behaviour occurs during the photophase but not the scotophase, suggesting that visual cues are required for maintenance of inter-individual spacing. No significant differences in male spacing behaviour occur between subjective day and subjective night in either constant dark or constant light conditions, suggesting that spatial patterning is not driven by a circadian rhythm.