I recently had good reason to return to a question pursuing me for many years now. I refer to this question as the “speech of the body”. For thousands of years our bodies have been mute, silenced, as our consciousness increasingly separated from the being of the world. We therefore normally don’t experience our bodies, or the world as “the other that is also me”. We experience both as an “it”, outside of our consciousness and alien to any status as a subject. When something goes amiss with my body, I must consult another person to find out what is wrong with “it”. This “alien” experience is reinforced by the technological world that can show us, for example, pictures of our internal bodies, with which we can have no relationship at all, except as told us by the experts. With all the diurnal and nocturnal goings-on in my body, I remain quite in the dark. My dreams normally seem not to reference or be informed by any bodily activities at all. I get no discernible hints from my dreams that could have diagnostic value. A gulf prevails between consciousness and body/world, as we all know today.
Yet, on occasion over the years, I have begun to experience something different—something I can only call the “speech of the body”: a strange speech that seems intent on breaking in, and at the same time breaking up my habitual modes of thinking. Heidegger says: “The growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being (muteness of the body/world) which defines the Age.” In the face of my anxiety something else is beginning to seek entry into existence through me.
Now I am engaged in the work of “saying” these experiences as accurately as I can, i.e. the work of opening up to a “clearing” where I may receive this speech of my body (or the world) speaking itself into psychological existence through “me”. This is a difficult formulation that I am working on now for future posts, and in the meantime I have written several essays that tried to articulate this experience in some small way. I list them here as a backstory to what I want to say next in a future post i.e., the phenomenology of the body coming to speech, coming to consciousness, coming to language!
1. Dreams and The Ineluctable Body
2. Frida Kahlo, Mouthpiece of Wounded Being
3. Wounded Being and The End of Organic Life
5. The Howl
6. Death Poems
7. The Meaning of the Bomb as World Destroyer
A longer version of this paper is at Academia:
My essay SPEECH OF THE BODY II: the mystery of suffering is now available.