# Prison for the Body ## Judith Butler and Foucault *Judith Butler and many Queer foundational texts mention Foucault repeatedly for having said something.* - We normally hear of how the Body is the Prison with the implicit understanding that the Soul is the real you and that you can't be fully aware of it or it cannot be free because your experience is bound to the constraint of a material body. But what Foucault actually said was this: **"The Soul is the prison of the body".** ## Hegel and What This Means ### Hegel - Codified mysticism into a modern philosophy - Marx distilled the philosophy and made it actionable (modern Gnosticism) - In this codification, the Social Constructions are the Spirit You manipulate the Geist or Social Construction of society around you through the idea and the material conditions. This Geist is what Hegel elucidated in Phänomenologie des Geistes - (Phenomenology of Spirit). ### Soul to the Spirit - The Geist transforms along the trajectory of History - Can also be expressed as the Spiritual trajectory of the transformation of history - Your soul is a part of the spirit (Geist) Your soul is your understanding of self through the social constructions of reality. In this way, the Soul is the application of Social Construction to you, making it the prison of the body. That is, the Social Constructions of what it means to have your body are your soul, and this imprisons you.