Conclusion

This chapter summarizes and gathers the main arguments of the book: the distinction between the carnal and the somatic strands of Christian corporeal imaginaries, the constitution of bodies in relation to the material world, the materializations of social arrangements in the world and its effects in human bodies. The conclusion also returns to the question of “poetics” as a suitable approach for speaking of flesh. Writing flesh requires languages attuned to silences, disruptions, and opacity, and to the complex qualities of sensation. Since flesh is always becoming, since it envelops and exceeds each one of our bodies, since our expressions emerge from it, writing flesh should be a poetics. This call for writing flesh as a poetics implies not only a style of writing but also recognition of the limits of our knowledge and appreciation for the imaginative dimensions of thought.