Body, Liquidity, and Flesh

Abstract

The theme has emerged over the last two decades as a highly prominent topic in the human sciences. Much this discourse has been developed from the work Foucault, some it is derived from Merleau-Ponty, and other points view have contributed by way anthropology, feminism, and psychoanalysis. Though this discourse has energized contemporary discussions power and agency, there is a difficulty that this thinking must eventually encounter as it addresses the experience embodiment as an intersubjective encounter with its own otherness. More specifically, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, as it unfolds in The Visible and the Invisible challenges reflective consciousness to open itself up to a genuinely experience and substance. ' It is not at all clear to me that this post-Cartesian challenge has been sufficiently taken on by the human sciences. Phenomenology awakened the modern to the possibility embodied subjectivity, reason grounded in the experience a vital, fleshly consciousness. Yet, for all the discourse generated on the body as a site power and contest, the concept the body still seems too often discussed as a creature organic autonomy, as a soft, at times bony tissue that encloses a shell subjective experience and existence. It is my belief that an attentive reading Bachelard's reflections on air, water, and dreams can offer a unique possibility for revisiting the thought Merleau-Ponty-of awakening postmodern and post-Cartesian consciousness to a much richer encounter with the phenomenology the body and the experience the flesh. Merleau-Ponty defines as chiasm, as an interlacing a being with, potentially, all other beings. As a complex tissue 'experience and in experience, flesh cannot, thus, be encountered as a familiar thing. It is continually in process, continually alive and dying, made up flows and vapors, presenting itself to everyday perception as an illusion substance and a deception material stability. I will argue that flesh might best be understood as an intersubjective plasma, as a complex fluid elements that are just as capable hardness as they are liquidity. Assets memory and experience become liquid in moments communicative intimacy and psychological transformation. As such, this essay will consider the concept the body not as a medium communication but as communication itself, as communication entered and exited by way liquidity and crystallization. The Conditions Embodiment What is my body?-this body that writes and speaks these words? Is it merely a bio-mechanical thing? My eyes that gaze upon my arms, my legs, my face in the mirror: they too are of this body, this body upon which they are focused like alien and mysterious cameras. That which gains the attention from the modern psychiatrist and neuroscientist-in other words, my brain-still, through their investigations, continues to earn the full academic credit for thinking about this body, my body. Yet it too is entirely this body. This place thought, where Descartes once began, is also the place feeling and sensation. I am conscious my body and its parts. And by way my body and its thinking and reflective properties, I am also conscious being conscious-as I am also aware what coming-to-consciousness feels like, especially moving from sleep to awakening, or being jarred to attention from reverie. Conscious my body, conscious my consciousness, and even my capacity for self, I remain somewhat baffled-especially in this context-about the comfortable certainty exhibited currently across academic fields that my is embodied.2 There is still so much to be discovered regarding the limits and conditions for both my body and this entity that has been named mind. In German, the preferred term for mind is Geist, which is customarily translated as spirit (or its Anglo-Germanic cognate equivalent ghost). …