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This book explores disembodiment, the experience of feeling alienated from one s own body, and shows how it emerges across clinical and social domains. It begins with an account of embodiment as the foundation of lived experience, interpersonal connection, and cultural inscription, before examining how disruptions of body image, body schema, ownership, and agency destabilize this balance.
Clinical cases illustrate different pathways into disembodiment: the alien limb in BIID, the loss of presence in depersonalization and PTSD, the fractured agency and hyper-reflexivity of schizophrenia, and the distorted body image of anorexia. The analysis then turns to racial disembodiment, where systemic racism and the white gaze impose estranging perspectives that reshape subjectivity at multiple levels.
To link these phenomena, the book introduces the uncanny as a framework for understanding how the familiar body becomes strange, and concludes by exploring re-embodiment techniques from sensory illusions to VR that open therapeutic and social possibilities.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Embodiment. Chapter 3: Pathological Disembodiment.- Chapter 4: Racial Disembodiment.- Chapter 5: The Uncanny as a Mediator of Disembodied Experiences.- Chapter 6: Re-Embodiment.- Chapter 7: Politics of (Dis)embodiment.
About the author
Giovanni Pennisi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences, University of Turin. He is a member of CRISCAT (International Research Center for Theoretical and Applied Cognitive Sciences) and former member of the ERC project FACETS (Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies). His research focuses on the interplay between phenomenology, psychiatry, post-colonial studies, and cognitive sciences.
Summary
This book explores
disembodiment
, the experience of feeling alienated from one’s own body, and shows how it emerges across clinical and social domains. It begins with an account of embodiment as the foundation of lived experience, interpersonal connection, and cultural inscription, before examining how disruptions of body image, body schema, ownership, and agency destabilize this balance.
Clinical cases illustrate different pathways into disembodiment: the alien limb in BIID, the loss of presence in depersonalization and PTSD, the fractured agency and hyper-reflexivity of schizophrenia, and the distorted body image of anorexia. The analysis then turns to racial disembodiment, where systemic racism and the white gaze impose estranging perspectives that reshape subjectivity at multiple levels.
To link these phenomena, the book introduces the uncanny as a framework for understanding how the familiar body becomes strange, and concludes by exploring re-embodiment techniques—from sensory illusions to VR—that open therapeutic and social possibilities.
