Foucault and Embodiment

In the book Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art  Foucault has a great little article dealing with the corporeal body and he plays around with the idea of the body as a utopia, which I interpret as being like a fantasy.  He really helped me to understand the way in which we are our bodies, and also to think about the strange way in which we are both visible and invisible, beings in the world, fleshy, flawed, but perceiving. Of the body he says, 

"It is in relation to it - and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign- that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world."

This idea is very closely aligned with the phenomenological perspective, but I find his notion that the body is also nowhere, very curious.  All in all, I really enjoyed the language of this article, and it has my mind moving about what my body means.  I also like this small quote that puts the body squarely in the centre of any consideration:

"My body is like the City of the Sun.  It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or Utopian, emerge and radiate."