“Canguilhem and the promise of the flesh” - HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2023

“Canguilhem and the promise of the flesh”

Résumé

The living body appears like an endlessly renewable reservoir of authenticity, hope, and taboo. But, for the sake of conceptual clarity, we are often been told that the (mere) body should be distinguished from the flesh. That is, it’s undeniable that I have a body; that I notice yours; that we worry about their birth and death and upkeep. But the flesh is a more transcendentalized, loaded concept – not least given its frequently religious background (incarnation: the Word made Flesh). It is the body ‘kicked upstairs’, ‘bumped up’ one ontological level. Flesh is like a mantra, an obsessive leitmotif. Is the difference just one of abstraction? Indeed, crucial to the narrative of phenomenology (most obviously in Merleau-Ponty but really, throughout, including in enactivism), to the story of ancestor worship and identity it tells itself and its acolytes around the campfire, is a basic distinction between the merely physical body and the flesh as something requiring ‘mineness’, namely, an understanding of it as uniquely ‘my own’, a feeling of ‘what it is like to be embodied’. This goes back to the Husserlian distinction between Körper, ‘body’ in the sense of one body among others in a vast mechanistic universe of bodies, and Leib, ‘flesh’ in the sense of a subjectivity which is the locus of experience. In this essay I reflect on this vision of the body’s authenticity and its costs, and contrast it with insights derived from Georges Canguilhem, whose critique of mechanism/mechanicism is not done in the name of a wholescale organicism and/or an unproblematized éloge of embodiment and privacy.

Mots clés

Domaines

Philosophie
Loading...
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

halshs-04243063, version 1 (15-10-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Charles T. Wolfe. “Canguilhem and the promise of the flesh”. Giuseppe Bianco; Charles Wolfe; et Gertrudis Van de Vijver. Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, Springer, pp.181-191, 2023, 978-3-031-20528-6. ⟨10.1007/978-3-031-20529-3_10⟩. ⟨halshs-04243063⟩
18 Consultations
0 Téléchargements
Dernière date de mise à jour le 07/04/2024
comment ces indicateurs sont-ils produits

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Plus