OK... there are a number of possible takes on this that would reject carnal corporeality without signing up to Cartesian dualism:
Spinoza ---- Spinoza refutes dualism, claiming, with Woebot, that the mind is the body (or the mind is the idea of the body). Crucial distinction for Spinoza is that between passive and active bodies. In what to standard western ontology might seem a paradox, active bodies are sensitive and open to the Outside, whereas passive bodies are walled into their own reactive circuitries.
Artaud ---- Artaud distinguishes between the body (without organs) and the organism --- the BwO is the body as pure potentiality, the organism the hierarchically ordered depotentiated
The Gnostics --- the Gnostics reject corporeality in the name of knowledge, or gnosis --- everything in the world, including yr own body, is the demiurge's delusion, a hideous simulation ....
I was talking with Ray the other night about how one of the most disastrous moves in contemporary theory is the 'phenomenologization of bodily experience', the obsession with the 'lived body'. This serves to incarnate thought, when, as Ray says, the point is to make contact with an excarnate thought.
Ray's essay 'Solar Catastrophism' is brilliant on this... it begins as a commentary on Lyotard's essay 'Can Thought Go on without a Body?' (from <I>The Inhuman</i>), which takes as its ultimate problem the question of the sun's inevitable explosion. What then? Must thought be embodied, or can we imagine it escaping the body?
Here's Ray:
'I want to suggest that the traumatic scission which divides organic life from inorganic death has its transcendental analogue in the irreparable disjunction between thought and solar death. Bear in mind that what is repeated in the death-drive is something that never happened: a non-event that cannot be registered within the perception-consciousness system. Thus, organic life merely recapitulates the non-occurrence of aboriginal inorganic death. Similarly, terrestrial philosophy as quest is fuelled by the non-occurrence of solar death as impossible possibility. Solar death is catastrophic because the collapse of the terrestrial horizon is unenvisageable for embodied thought—unless that thought can switch from organic to inorganic (silicone based) embodiment—, and it is because it is unenvisageable that solar catastrophe overturns the relation between thought and its terrestrial horizon. Thus, for embodied terrestrial thought solar death is not an event but a trauma, something which does not take place within thought’s terrestrial horizon but persists as an unconscious trace disturbing embodied philosophical consciousness. Recall the earlier pronouncement made by Lyotard’s HE: “Everything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which you now draw energy to defer answers, if in short thought as quest, dies out with the sun.” Everything is dead already, not only because the solar catastrophe vitiates the earth’s horizonal status as infinite, supposedly inexhaustible reservoir of noetic possibility, but also because thought as quest is driven by death, and strives to become equal to the death whose trace it bears by disembodying itself. Yet absolute disembodiment remains philosophically inconceivable. Although the materialist is less refractory on this issue than the phenomenologist, all HE can suggest is a change of embodiment, a shift from a carbon to a silicone-based substrate. This is only to postpone the day of reckoning, because sooner or later thought will have to reckon with the collapse of the ultimate horizon: the asymptopic death of the cosmos roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion (101728) years from now, when matter itself will cease to exist—along with the possibility of any kind of embodiment.
Because disembodied thought is philosophically unimaginable, HE, Lyotard’s materialist, limits the scope of the catastrophe by turning the collapse of the terrestrial horizon into an occasion for a change of horizon. The infinite horizonal reserve fuelling philosophical questioning is merely expanded from the terrestrial to the cosmic scale. The cosmos is now the locus of the irreparable disjunction between death and thought. But if thought is already dead this expansion of horizon is ultimately to no avail: of what use is the perpetuation of thought’s embodied life if what is perpetuated is philosophy’s constitutive inability to resolve, i.e. bind, the traumatic disjunction between thought and death? Since the death of the cosmos is just as much of an irrecusable faktum for philosophy as the death of the sun, every horizonal reserve upon which embodied thought draws to fuel its quest is necessarily finite. Why then should thought continue investing in an account whose dwindling reserves are circumscribed by the temporary parameters of embodiment? Why keep playing for time? A change of body is just a way of postponing thought’s inevitable encounter with the death that drives it. And a change of horizon is just a means of occluding the transcendental nature of the trauma that fuels thought.'
