What a Body Knows:
Finding Wisdom in Desire

Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the Revaluation
of Christian Values (2006)

A radical new approach to healing our cultural obsessions with food, sex, and spirit.

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Overview:
This book is about desire. It is about the felt sense of yearning for something we lack—the yearning that fills our hearts and minds and bodies to the point of overwhelming other concerns, and impels us towards whatever we believe will grant us the satisfaction we seek.

More specifically, this book is about our desires for “food,” “sex,” and “spirit,” three life-enabling elements, as acted out in the mainstreams of contemporary American culture. We desire food—the nourishment that enables our health. We desire sex—the physical intimacy that releases us into bliss. We desire spirit—the affirmation that our lives are worth living, and the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that accompany such affirmation.

Yet among many living in the United States, these three desires are in crisis. As scholars, social scientists, and public officials tell us, how we are eating is not promoting our health: nearly two thirds of all Americans are overweight, half of those are obese, and the numbers, especially among children, are rising. How we are having sex is not enabling the life-long passionate love that most Americans want from their intimate relationships: nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. So too, how we are living our lives is not generating the sense of affirmation we desire: levels of depression, suicide, and social disorders are at an all time high, among young adults in particular. And even though individuals, experts, and government agencies are spending large amounts of time, energy, and money in pursuit of health and well being, the patterns of chronic dissatisfaction in each realm are holding firm.

What can be done?

It is tempting to blame our desires. We want to believe that our desire for food is making us fat; that our desire for sex (or lack thereof) is wrecking havoc on our partnerships; that our desire for spirit is making us feel alienated and unhappy. For if our desires are the problem, as we hope, then all we need to do is find the right approach to managing those desires—the diet plan or drug, the marital vows or sex techniques, the religious authority or public policy—and we will find the pleasure, health, and well being we seek. As this book documents, however, approaches that focus on controlling or altering our desires are not proving as effective as predicted. As we shall see, they are in fact perpetuating a cause at the root of all three social crises.

Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies (2004)