Becoming Embodied: Giving Oneself a Body

“In truth, ‘my body’ indicates a possession, not a property.
That is, an appropriation without legitimation.
I possess my body, I treat it as I wish, I hold over it the jus uti et abutendi.
Yet it in turn possesses me: it pulls or troubles me, clouds me, stops me, pushes me, rejects me.
We are a pair of the possessed, a couple of demonic dancers.”

No one ever stops dancing. We are always dancing. No one can deny their own body. To give oneself a body and die within it. Between these two points lies a time: our time, in the plural. Beyond the time of the I lies the time of the we, shared, relational and full of memory. Although every body ultimately answers to an inescapable time—biological, chronological—everything happens in the porosity of flesh, in the fragility of its contact with the other, that-which-is-not-me and places me in relation-with the world that I myself am. There is no I without a world, and no world without a skin to receive it.

Perhaps, then, my body is not an object but a scene in which all that I am is expressed, where the world finds its contour and its crack. Every pain sounds. Within this fleshy, savoury and contingent relation we sway as though in a lullaby; the body opens to the unthinkable estrangement of this world, emphatically signalled by pain. Life hurts us. Life sounds.

We are not an isolated entity but a world of relations. As Peter Sloterdijk rightly observes, we are and live immersed in a vibrating bubble where the air inhabiting us is the same air that separates us from the world. We are and live in critical proximity to the world that we are: inside and outside at once, in a to-and-fro of disembodied subjectivity in which the I becomes embodied and dispersed at the same time.

In mourning, everything remains suspended, in the first inclination, before the body. There are no boundaries, only a choreography of infinite approaches. We are pure overflow at the threshold between one’s own and the foreign, between inside and outside. Without knowing it, we incline towards what exceeds us. Our bodies¹ are in no way neutral; they are spaces that express themselves² and enter into relation within themselves, inside themselves, among themselves, with one another—embodied, disembodied, possessed, laden with values and meanings that become transparent in their first and final expressions: birth³ and death. Perhaps life is nothing but a brief transition between horizontality and verticality, and back again. A slow inclination. Slowly. It hurts.

The body that hurts, the suffering body, finds consolation in the suspended response, a contingency without time and almost without air, between the I and the world: a thunderous silence where the vibration of life and the resonance of the soul find their own threshold. Every body silently harbours its own time, its own silence and, without knowing it, lives it, listens to it, knows it, experiences it and finally embodies it. We are all bodies, we are every body, bodies without origin or destination, bodies without organs and flesh with a secret expiry date⁴. There is no dead time for the body. Its time is nothing other than the fold in which its being dissolves: a trace sustained only in its first and final repetition.

This bodily space is the origin of every other space; without the body there could be no other body and no other space. Thus, because no other way is possible, we project ourselves, we project the world outwards, allowing everything other than me to exist undisturbed. For this very reason, the body is porous and knows how to listen. The I and the world⁵ sound, dream and finally become the same thing⁶: the one and the other, in unison.

To study the body is to auscultate pain at the limits of existence, where listening is at stake, where—in relation to medicine—what constitutes a body is put at risk and boundaries are constantly imagined and renegotiated. Between life and death lies a world, and our bodies are its prior condition of possibility. Every body contains the world. Between them lie skin and its porosity. My body is what gives shape to my world, what gives life to the world, inside and outside, what receives, nourishes and protects my consciousness. The body itself is our only means of perceiving all other possible worlds.

The body cannot be understood as a totality, but as a sentient, mutable, sensitive and almost eternal entity, always conditioned by being in-relation-with and always forming part-of other worlds foreign to its own exteriority, thanks precisely to its capacity to grant meaning from within to what is felt. Like music listening to itself. This is the meaning prior to existence⁷: a body and everything else.

The boundaries between inside and outside blur, dissipate, disappear. There is no boundary between body and world. There is no body that does not listen to itself and to the world at the same time and without intending to. There is no distance between body and world. There are no eyelids before the world. Bodies listen, endlessly turning upon themselves. Invisible forces exceed our thought: through gravity, every body belongs to the greatest dance company in the world; it is inevitable. We dance without knowing it, without wishing to. We dance until death.

Our senses and movement—the movement of the body and of the world itself—generate a kinaesthetic sense apprehended through the sensations of those movements. Everything falls under its own weight, time as well. Time takes time. The consonance between body and world—natural and cultural—between bodies and celestial worlds, presupposes the existence of a series of senses that account for the world, in the singular.

For this reason we harbour more worlds than we think we know, than those of which we have knowledge and those we know well. Our body stretches towards that strange object which we use in all its parts⁸, almost without knowing it, as a source of knowledge about other worlds that we frequent, inhabit and seek to understand or endow with an ultimate meaning. We inhabit the silence of our body. Without intending to, without knowing it, we incline towards the unknown. Towards the other. We are always predisposed.

There is a phenomenological counterpoint to the clinical and distant gaze of cynical reason. The idea of critical proximity means being immersed in a wakefulness that studies itself until it becomes lucid within an eternal dream. Subjectivity as an interior inhabited through a form of poetic, metaphysical possession, inseparable from breath, from the vital breath, from voice, from the Greek phoné: that voice which speaks and speaks to us, like the voices of our dead, coexisting in a radical proximity that blurs every border, where we find an inside and an outside perfectly fused and indistinct, like a street in fog. Everything is fog. Home seems to be as much inside as outside. There is no limit unknown to the body. I refer back to pain. I incline; pain subjugates me, overcomes me; I incline once again. The pain of the soul does not know the limits of the body. One tends to incline before the body.