About the Author

Karmen Mackendrick is Associate Professor of Philosophy at LeMoyne College. She has also written Counterpleasures and Immemorial Silence.

Reviews

MacKendrick's "Word Made Skin"offers an exciting and innovative philosophy of desire. This deeply engaging work, which reads at moments like a poem, a prayer, or a love letter, performs dazzlingly what it also analyzes incisively--namely, the mutual touching, enfolding, and cutting-across of bodies, of words, and above all of bodies /and/ words that meet (as they can only meet) at their limits. Richly intertextual philosophical chapters exploring figures of "touch," "fold," and "cut" are provocatively interleaved with chapters on the risen Christ of John's Gospel, the light-enfolded Marian figure of T.S. Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday," and tattooed images of the "sacred" and "immaculate" hearts of Christ and Mary. MacKendrick's philosophy repeatedly touches upon theology, and her book should be read by theologians as well as philosophers and others interested in desire, language, embodiment, and the relation between them. -- -Virginia Burrus Drew Theological Seminary "Karmen MacKendrick is one of the most original and most important philosophers and theologians now writing in the English language. *Word Made Skin* brings her thinking to full maturity. It is beautiful and disturbing, complex and clear: a profound exploration of the surface." -- -Crispin Sartwell Maryland Institute College of Art