Vivian Sobchack

Carnal Thoughts

Vivian Sobchack

In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, <I>Carnal Thoughts </I>shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all «had our eyes done»; why we are «moved» by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. <I>Carnal Thoughts </I>provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of «making sense» requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.