The New Flesh

In this thesis, I interrogate the mind/body split that has been perpetuated by the western philosophical tradition. Through Julia Kristeva’s abjection concept and Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs, I analyze body horror as a genre indicative of a dualism that attempts to ignore the primacy of the body. I take David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive as examples of the mind assuming willful primacy. I then study Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as an example of hyperregulation of the body. Finally, I turn to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Crimes of the Future and find, in the latter film, a Deleuzian instance of allowing the body to transform in relation to a changing environment. Cronenberg’s vision of body horror subverts the genre by locating futurity in the changing body. What emerges is both engaged with and critical of posthumanism: a novel suggestion for the relationship between body, mind, and world.