“What does it mean to speak, as phenomenologists do, of an ‘embodied subject’? At first sight, the meaning is trivial; namely, that we are in the world not simply as autonomous, Cartesian subjects but as selves who are defined by our bodies. In turn, this elevates the body to more than the contingent vessel in which the ‘real self’ is placed, but establishes a unitary phenomenon which is not dissectible in terms of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ alone. This grand claim gives rise to a gauntlet of complex issues, the majority of which will have to be overlooked presently. However, one issue is unavoidable.”
“My being an embodied subject does not simply refer to my occupancy of a body in space. My body is not one thing among many. I am not ‘embodied’ simply in that I am a biological entity that is composed of the materiality of flesh, and that alone. Rather, my embodied being is given its specificity and irreducibility through being the centre of my lived experience. In an essential way, my body is the world in which I experience firsthand. Indeed, when I experience the world, then I do so through my body. It is not that my visual sight touches the world before being processed by my cognitive faculties, but that my body as a perceiving organ asserts itself as the very condition for experience.”
“All of this, then, is a manner of putting forward the primacy of the body. At the same time, however, the prioritising of the body in Merleau- Ponty does not relegate cognition to a second-order process. Mental and bodily phenomena, to be clear, do not occupy a causal relationship with one another, but present themselves as being identical. Yet the relation is an identity in which perception is inconceivable without the human body. As Merleau-Ponty has it, ‘I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or I rather I am it’ (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 173).”
- Dylan Trigg, ‘The Return of the New Flesh: Body Memory in David Cronenberg’s The Fly’
