“Wir leben, indem wir leiben”

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Awaiting execution, Socrates asks, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition (μοχθηροῦ καὶ διεφθαρμένου σώματος)?” “In no way (Οὐδαμῶς),” replies Crito. While one can only conjecture whether Heidegger would agree with this precise formulation, the specter of (the corruptibility of) the body loomed large during his later years and in much scholarship to follow. Among the many scholars who have addressed the question of the body in Heidegger, nearly all agree that he—early, middle, and late—maintains that Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), not the reverse. Adducing the discussion of Sein-zum-Tode in §§51-53 of Being and Time and the role of der Sterbliche in the Bremen Lectures, I argue that this relation is instead mutually reciprocal, for Heidegger’s own accounts of the role of mortality demonstrate that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being. I term what this thinking proffers a corpoietic understanding of the body, and I conclude by discussing what light this might shed on past indictments of Heidegger’s (non)treatment of the body and on late twentieth-century attempts to think bodily difference.