Body Metaphor

There is a lot of weariness around the body metaphor, and for good reason. For hundreds of years and probably much further, the body metaphor has been rolled out to normalize exploitative relations: the head needs the hands and so on. But what the metaphor does accomplish is illustrating the nature and, more importantly, the consequences of deep interconnection. 

For better or for worse, the body's many constituent parts work together to maintain their own mutual integrity, each playing an essential part but at the same time being completely dependent on each other. And then a given body as a unity with a certain ascendant character, could very well be destructive to its own self and its continuity, which itself is a relation in terms of other bodies within a greater organizing body like a society. Hence the fool and villain/criminal archetypes.