Cultural theory, in our post-modern times, has abolished the Cartesian dualism between Body/Mind[1] and for consequential extension between Nature/Culture. Therefore the exclusion of the ‘body’ in the philosophical discourse has finally come to an end; the diffused somatophobia[2] started in ancient Greece and particularly from a Platonic system of ideas (eideia) and ‘officially’ ends with Post-modernity. The body is not seen any longer as a betrayal and prison of the soul, reason or mind.
Although, it is worth mentioning that Descartes’ elevation of res cogitans (consciousness) above res extensa (corporeality) had already found a profound opposition from a neglected 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, whose monism dismantled the mechanistic, dualistic and essentialist perception of the subject.
A contemporary careful reading of Spinoza’s speculative work mostly operated by Gilles Deleuze has suggested the reconsidering of the conception of the personal ‘I’ as a unitary subject, this linear static idea has been subverted by a rhizomatic[3] nomadic subjectivity.
These postmodern-I-theorisations oppose the multiple ‘I’ to the old unitary ‘I’, they operate a reconfiguration of subjectivity. However, as a current wave of Feminist theory suggests, the multiple ‘I’ is still very much linked to the body and to the social construction of gender. Although the ‘I’ becomes nomad, decentred and multiple, it is still marked by a socially emphasised dichotomy between male and female.
In this regard the Australian theorist Elizabeth Grosz[4] accomplishes a very insightful analysis. She is particularly intrigued by what the Cartesian dualism has produced in the understanding of gender as social construction in favour of masculinity (phallogocentrism). Women are more related to the natural, the res extensa which is governed by its physical laws and ontological exigencies therefore this implies a sort of identification of the category of ‘woman’ with the physical, natural extension of the ‘body’. According to Grosz’s systematic analysis, this factor has caused a severe exclusion of femininity within the philosophical discourse and a subsequent cultural denigration of the female (Nature/ body) as compared to the male identity (Culture/ mind).
She suggests that, in order to understand what sexual identity is today, we do need to look at our very body. How do we perceive it? And how is the body as a thing of Nature transformed into a sign of Culture?
‘The body is a social, cultural, historical production; where the term production designates both product (corporeality) and process (‘becoming’ state). In this current of contra-essentialism, where (sexual) identity is socially constructed rather than being essential; the word identity itself goes through a shift by becoming identification, it is necessary to operate an update of our vocabulary to define the passage from the static perception of the body to the ideas of process, multiplicity and construction.’[5]

In Stuart Hall’s terms, the general view of the self becomes decentred: ‘[…] old identities which stabilized the social world for so long are in the decline, giving rise to new identities and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject’[6].
All these theories might appear quite destabilising, in fact they dismantle assumptions that are reassuring to people such as unity, identity and gender divided social roles. But, simultaneously, this new approach to the study of the self aims at reframing and reinterpreting the current position of the contemporary man. In this sense, it can be interpreted as an open view on human contemporary identity, which tries to set itself free from formulaic, fixed ‘binaristic’ patterns.
In so doing, I will concentrate a large part of my analysis on the contemporary understanding of the human body and on the subsequent discussion on the multiplicity of the human subject. Throughout the paper, I interpret the transgender subject as the praxis to Lacanian and, more largely, post modern concepts of multiplicity as opposed to unitary. Lacan insisted that the ego was an illusion, he discussed that the self is better portrayed as belonging to the realm of discourse rather than to a real thing or to an immutable and fixed structure of the mind.

[1] The following analysis is based on a post-structuralist reading and interpretation of Baruch Spinoza’s natural philosophy.
[2] Translated from ancient Greek, it literally means ‘fear of the body’.
[3] The rhizome is a concept elaborated by two French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. It designates a network of stem, like grass or ferns, which are laterally connected, as opposed to hierarchical root systems like trees. The concept of rhizome is used by Deleuze and Guattari to evoke a kind of polymorphous perversity of the body politic.
[4] Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, 1994, pp.150-230
[5] Ibid. p 221
[6] Hall, Stuart, The Question of Cultural Identity in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, Hubert and Thompson eds., Cambridge: Polity Press, p.596