Book Review: The Philosophy and Politics of Healing the Body: A Review of Drew Leder’s The Healing Body, Northwestern University Press, 2024

This article provides a philosophical review of Drew Leder’s (2024) book, The Healing Body, the culmination of a three-decade-spanning trilogy begun with The Absent Body (1990) and continued with The Distressed Body (2016). It contextualizes, explicates, and evaluates this book and its contents from a philosophical perspective. In the first part of the book, Leder sketches an ontology of embodiment rooted in the existential phenomenology of thinkers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty; he uses it as the basis for elaborating twenty “healing strategies” designed to help address the dys-embodiment, or disturbed experiences of embodiment, which are characteristic of those with medically ill bodies. In the second part, Leder explores the applicability of these strategies to persons experiencing dys-embodiment due to social discrimination or political oppression rather than to medical illness. The final part ventures into Eastern metaphysics and questions of spiritual healing. This review covers these divisions in order, concluding with a further examination of Leder’s foray into politics in part 2.