In his book, John Tambornino explores the significance of embodiment for political theory through a study of four thinkers: Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Stuart Hampshire. Tambornino casts his project as an attempt to uncover a commonly forgotten or repressed dimension of human experience, yet his point is more finely tuned than that: By stocking his cast of characters with theorists who at least partially acknowledge corporeality, but in different ways, he reaches beyond the question of whether the body is politically important to ask how, specifically, embodiment ought to be understood and engaged. His own position is most closely aligned with Hampshire's “self-conscious materialism,” which treats the physiological explanation of human activity not as a denial of agency but as one possible technique of freedom. By taking account of the ways in which our thoughts, feelings, and conduct are influenced by our “bodily situations” (p. 117), we may enhance our capacity to work on and modify these situations “by tactical means” (p. 6).

The central chapters of this book are artfully arranged, with each thinker adding a new layer of complexity to Tambornino's picture of corporeality. He begins with Arendt's insistence that the body, as a site of sheer necessity and homogeneity, is properly understood as private, not public. Yet he also finds hints in Arendt of the importance of the body for politics—especially in her account of the sources of “natality” and “uniqueness,” which are closely connected but not reducible to the phenomena of birth and physical separateness. Taylor improves upon Arendt by affirming embodiment as an indispensable condition of human agency, but for Tambornino, Taylor also overvalues the achievement of “attunement” between a subject's self-understanding and the purposiveness, the “single direction of life,” that she finds already implicit though not yet fully developed in her (embodied) self and her (corporeal) world (p. 53). Nietzsche calls Taylor's teleology into question, stressing the multiplicity of equally inessential possibilities within and among bodies. So does Hampshire, although in Tambornino's presentation, Hampshire's materialism, unlike Nietzsche's, is tinged with pessimism, perpetually in mourning for the unlived possibilities that must be sacrificed in any project of self-making. It is also interrupted by a moral universalism rooted in a thin account of “basic needs,” and part of what Tambornino admires in Hampshire is his refusal to “seek a metaphysical or metatheoretical position from which to alleviate this tension” between his moral theory and his materialism (p. 128).

Taken as a sequence of studies of four important theorists, The Corporeal Turn is a mixed success. Tambornino's central chapters are survey-like, touching on a large number of issues fairly briefly. (The chapter on Arendt discusses her critique of the philosophical tradition, her distinction between public and private, her account of natality, her view of the will, her understanding of the relationship of the body to identity, and her conceptions of thinking and judgment, all in 20 pages). This approach makes the book capacious and accessible, virtues that are enhanced by Tambornino's clear, deliberate, and largely jargonless prose, as well as by the multidimensionality and generosity of his readings. These are lucid and thoughtful portraits. On the other hand, this approach also leaves the chapters feeling slightly diffuse, and specialist readers may find some of the material familiar, though skill-fully presented. Of the four, I found the chapter on Hampshire to be the most novel: As Tambornino notes, a more predictable book would have turned from Nietzsche to Foucault, yet Tambornino makes a compelling case for Hampshire's importance, and his presentation of the idea of self-conscious materialism—especially by contrast with “crass” materialism, which concludes that thought and will can be explained physically but does not ask how that conclusion might itself come to inform our activities and practices—is fascinating (p. 111).

Still, I wish Tambornino had devoted a full chapter at the end of the book to his account of the politics of self-conscious materialism. That is not to say that he ignores the issue. In the chapter on Hampshire, Tambornino distinguishes between two ways in which an awareness of embodiment, and the resulting psychophysical explanations of thought and behavior, might play out in practice. He imagines an individual who finds herself “intellectually committed to racial equality” but is still afflicted by feelings of revulsion at the sight of interracial couples. Such a person, Tambornino suggests, might undertake a project of reflexive work on her bodily responses, perhaps through therapy, or through gradual acclimation “by spending time in mixed settings,” or by cultivating “an appreciation for art that portrays interracial relations” (p. 120). But he also describes bodily interventions by state institutions, such as the “cognitive restructuring” of sex offenders through close physical monitoring, conditioning through aversion therapy, and the manipulation of testosterone levels (pp. 120–121). He approves of the former sort of practice, but, as a self-described “liberal pluralist,” rejects the latter (p. 139).

I share Tambornino's gut reactions, but I wonder about the relationship between these judgments and the theoretical work that has preceded them. The difference between these two cases seems to turn on the distinction between a “voluntary” project of self-reform and an intervention from the outside (p. 120), but Tambornino's own efforts to unsettle our conventional view of agency make it hard to invoke the distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” so easily—not because those terms have been revealed to be meaningless, but because, at this point, the reader has been primed for a reconstructed account of what terms like “voluntary” might mean once we have taken our hitherto neglected corporeality into account. In lieu of such an account, he sometimes seems to fall back on a conventional view of the body and its passions as something to be governed by a relatively autonomous intellect. The fixed point for the agent in his first case, after all, is her “intellectual” commitment to racial equality, and her work on herself involves bringing her feelings into accord with her thoughts: In this example, anyway, there is little of the interplay of experiment, exploration, reflection, and decision that Tambornino elsewhere describes so nicely. Still, if some parts of the argument remain underdeveloped, it is to his credit that the brevity of this smart book leaves the reader not relieved but wanting more.