Reflecting on a heart transplant, Jean-Luc Nancy questions whether life resides in "his" body.
The intrus is no other than me, my self; none other than man himself. No other than the one, the same, always identical to itself and yet that is never done with altering itself. At the same time sharp and spent, stripped bare and over-equipped, intruding upon the world and upon itself: a disquieting upsurge of the strange, conatus of an infinite excrescence.
("L'Intrus," p. 13, available at influxus)
Is it a modern preoccupation that leads from the excessive to the infinite? Anyway, Nancy's essay is feeding my doubts about Merleau-Ponty's body. Am I really a sensuous being?
2 Comments:
What about the out of body experiences that some people experience whilst on the operating table or in extreme circumstances.
And what about near-death experiences after which people come back to their "normal" waking (sleep-walking) every-day consciousness.
Where is the point or locus of being then?
I think near death and other out of body experiences are interesting but I don't know what to make of them. There is a sensuality, but consciousness is separated from its sense organs. The locus of consciousness moves away from the body, and yet it also returns to the body. One sees one's body as an object, like a corpse. This is in contrast to the normal way we experience our bodies as a habitation.
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