[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

the model of play 14 can help us understand what is at issue here, since being in spaceis to be implicated in the multiplicity of its symbols and rules. In other words, we cannotbehave toward space as we would toward an external object, we can only participate ina process that draws us to itself and forms us, enveloping us in total fascination andsurprise, and entailing great risk. 152.Words such as mythical, poetic, playful, speak of a space that eludes being measured orany other kind of calculation; better words may say about space what can only be knownthrough lived experience. We should, however, take note at this point and discern somethingessential: the “lived” that is comprised in space is far from representing any kindof psychological experience or any subjectivism that would interpret in individual termswhat comes to the human being through the senses. This “lived,” of space, is not somethinglived but, rather, the lived itself, thus translating the very mode of man’s embeddednessin the world in terms of an integral presence that reveals a pre-possession of spaceover body. In other words, if there is ‘a lived’ concerning space, it is what space throwsback at me as a reflection, by way of surmounting the traditional split between interiorand external world. It is as if a very particular mode of being a body (my own body) isthe very place where space gets to be experienced and expressed, i.e., where space comesto exist as sense. And this is far from saying too little: the subject as body knows theworld in the act that makes it a body, and the world knows itself in the subject.A body’s belonging to space may be described as indwelling, in the sense that the bodyis embedded or inlaid in space, “frequents” it, is present to it, simultaneously integratingthat “outside” 16 which is always already an “inside.” Therefore we can discover, in this indwellingwhich is also an intertwining, the body’s responses to the enticement ofthings. 17 From a phenomenological point of view, there are several equally importantimplications to such an assumption. First of all, they allow us to conclude that space putsmy whole body into play, in the same manner that my body puts the whole of space intoplay, given that no other affinity with an external aspect is conceivable here. Moreover,if this is so, it will be equally clear that I am Leib rather than Körper, i.e., a living bodythat, as Marc Richir rightly remarks, never leaves us, 18 being the framework of ourcondition as beings in the world. Finally, we are speaking here of a connection which,being always already “felt,” is then first to be considered for thematization. Hence it ispossible to affirm, more precisely, that no place could ever be understood, unless it alsowere of an affective or ante-predicative character, for body and space are always born inone and the same moment, as well as from each other.14Play, as was shown by E. Fink, is an anthropological category which, by reinstating existence inits rational plenitude, reflects a form of symbolico-metaphorical coincidence of that existence with the totalitywhich animates it. In brief, play is truly an existential act characterized by the welcoming and reflectionof the escalating possibilities of the world. Cf. Eugen Fink, Le jeu comme symbole du monde (Paris:Minuit, 1966), 22; 138; 228.15Cf. Maria Luísa Portocarrero Silva, “Linguagem, Tradição e Jogo em H.-G. Gadamer,” in MiguelB. Pereira, ed., Tradição e Crise (Coimbra: F.L.U.C., 1986), 358ff.16Henri Maldiney, “À l’écoute de Henri Maldiney, à propos de corps et architecture,” in Chris Youènes,Philippe Nys, and Michel Mangematin, ed., L’architecture au corps (Bruxelles: Ousia, 1997), 18.17Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 161.18Marc Richir, “Corps, espace et architecture,” in Youènes, Nys, and Mangematin, ed.,L’architecture au corps, 24.115