[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

If our analysis is correct, the “placing” of the body in space turns out to be a paradoxicalcondition in so far as it is marked by the “slippage” of physical space into a non-coincidencewith itself. Through a “metamorphosis” achieved by means of a strange exchange system,physical space “slips” into the Umwelt of an expressive, significant body; a body which,reversibly, ceases to be in homogeneous space only. This possibility is demonstrated bythe fact that a thing never appears as spatial without at the same time receiving from -- orgiving to -- the beholder the whole of space in the evident a priori of its symbolism.Now, when we speak in this fashion about a lived experience of space, what we are talkingabout is not related to possession, but rather to reciprocal belonging. It is a relationby which I discover myself as a world-bound body, in the sense that we are no longer referringto a relationship between a subject and an external object, but to a living body thatfeels the world from the inside and his or her own inside as outside of the world; a worldwhose outside passes through the inside of the body as an ante-predicative reference forall comprehension. In brief, for the body, being in space is not an exercise in precisionbut a gesture of immersion in what is perceptible by the senses, an immersion always alreadyperceived, always already felt. The presence of the body in space is hence, to a largeextent, unsignalizable, not because our body ceases to be situated as a thing among things,but because that does not translate all that is meant by presence. There is a space that inspires19 the body and, however much the body may be mingling with objective space,it is nevertheless characterized by verticality and depth, for it appears to dilate, shrink,disperse, open itself up in pulsations, and retract. 20Let us intensify our search for the mode of being (in) space of that body, an objectivebody, when seen from the outside. Yet a body, when lived from the inside, fuses with theobjects and prolongs itself in them without ever discovering where it itself ends and thosebegin. In other words, it is a body harboring from space a knowledge without place, wherethinking and perceiving cannot be told apart.This constitutive ambiguity reveals the body’s capacity for reflexivity, asserted byMerleau-Ponty in his Phénoménologie with reference to the Husserlian problematic of“double sensations.” 21 The body in the world is an object but, in so far as it is able toknow itself in the world, not just an object. Being a being that knows itself (to be) in theworld, it is a subject, but not just a subject, since that knowing, far from driving it away fromthat world, plunges it right into the world. Widely known, in this context, is Merleau-Ponty’sfamous formulation on the question of a touching-touched body: “whenever I touch myright hand with my left hand, the right hand (i.e., an object) possesses, in the same way,this peculiar quality of feeling.” 22 Since we never are, at the same time and in relation toeach other, touching and touched, we must conclude that the issue is the hand’s capacityof being alternately touching and touched. In the transition from one function to the other,it is possible to recognize the touched hand as the very same that will soon thereafter betouching. And thus, for a brief moment, we catch a glimpse of an involvement or incarnationof the hand that, setting out to touch, finds itself being touched. At that moment, “thebody catches itself, from the outside, performing a function of knowledge; it tries to touch19Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 31-32.20We could also consider in this regard the kinestheses of the body’s eyes and limbs. In spite of thefact that the body can see and feel itself as an appearing body, such kinestheses belong to an order whichis not just the one of physical sensations, as they precisely reveal that body to itself as an excess. Cf. MarcRichir, “Nature, corps et espace en phénoménologie,” in Chris Younès, ed., Ville contre-nature. Philosophieet architecture (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 38. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 278.21Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 109.22Ibid.116