So just a quicky post here – check out this article “Are you in denial about your weight?”. The ‘expert’ consulted recommends asking yourself the following questions to determine if you are indeed in denial:
- Do I have a body weight that falls within a healthy body mass index range?
- Does my body reflect who I really am?
- Do I honour and respect my body the way I should?
- Does my body support everything I want to do with my life?
The media are in denial if they think this article is newsworthy and they think that the quote above is publishable! My first (and last) rebuttal must be: Who is the ‘I’ in the above question? I would argue that the ‘I’ is more illuminating if replaced with ‘society’, hence:
- Does society judge me to have a body weight that falls within their healthy body mass index range?
- Does my body reflect who society thinks I really am?
- Does society honour and respect my body the way society should?
- Does my body support everything society wants me to do with my life?
This at least demonstrates where the desire inherent to attempts at weight loss ‘Really’ lies – that is, with the answer to the elusive question: Why are we so interested in the size of the Other?
My favourite of those questions is:
- Does my body reflect who I really am?
The hard kernel that I take from Lacan is the split subject. The way I understand — which may be entirely wrong, but it is my wrongness — is that we are never who we ‘really’ are. In the process of becoming members of a human culture, we feel we have lost something of our true essence. Moreover, that feeling is an illusion of language, a figment of our imaginations, an ego conceit.
Our bodies are culturally and linguistically defined, which means they will never be what we ‘really’ are. Getting stuck on that is to get stuck on an illusion, or, perhaps, to get lost in a symbolic order. Each time we try to re-express our discomfort, we do it through language, which assigns a new place in the symbolic order to our bodies, which we don’t like, so we try to express of discomfort. This is perpetual anxiety.
I think that is why all these ‘pseudo-pop-psych’ articles use the term ‘real’. It is their unsophisticated and banal attempt at apprehending their perpetual anxiety. If you say to the (headless)fatty “does your body reflect who you REALLY are?” the answer demanded by our perpetual anxiety is “NO” and then a “I’m skinny trapped in a fat body” or something similar. What they are failing to understand is that “NO” is everyone’s answer – all subjects are in a state of discomfort vis-a-vis their bodies, as you say… hair colour, wrinkles, fat deposits, feet size, nose hair, eye proximity, monobrow-icity, height, weight, width, skin colour, baldness, waist, hips, toenail length ad infinitum. That is what is so (un)believable about the question. It is answered before it is asked! Thanks Bill – I enjoy your Lacanian mind