Embodiment

"Substance dualism" or the thesis that a person is an embodied nonphysical being (mind or soul) is systematically caricatured in philosophy of mind literature as involving an untenable bifurcation. Instead of such a splintered, divided concept of the person, I defend integrative dualism, the thesis that while a person is a nonphysical subject (and thus a being that can survive the death of the body), in this life he or she functions as a united, embodied being. Embodiment consists of six nonmoral goods (they are good but not as in "moral goods" such as justice and courage): the virtues of sensations, agency, causal constitution, cognitive power, intelligible coherence, and affective incorporation. This united concept of an embodied person places values at the heart of the philosophy of human nature. This value-oriented concept of embodiment can be a rich, common resource for Christian-Muslim dialogue. This value-oriented concept of embodiment can be a rich, common resource for Christian-Muslim dialogue.

In this paper I present some elements of Marc Richir's political phenomenology. Drawing from the Husserlian distinction between Leib and Körper, as well as from the ontology of the flesh sketched in the last works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richir proposed a novel reading of the relation between phenomenology, the social and the political. His project is built upon the distinction between incarnation and incorporation, two forms of embodiment that, while corresponding to the two ways of experiencing One's own body noted by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, concern not only the embodied subject but also the individuation of the social body. This approach can be read as a radically embodied inquiry into the social and the political that constitutes a phenomenological critique of identitarian essentialism and disembodied universalism. In the first section of the article I explain the role played by intersubjectivity, asubjectivity and embodiment in Richir's understanding of the process of phenomenalization. The second section is dedicated to his elaborations on the joint sensemaking of the ipse and the community, articulated around the distinction between incarnation and incorporation. In the final section I outline a possible application of the concepts developed by Richir to the contemporary debate around identity-based politics.

The present paper analyzes Jorie Graham’s “Sea Change”, the eponymous poem of her 2008 poetry collection, through Julia Kristeva’s theories on semiotic and the abject. By tracing the historical attitudes towards embodiment, this research attempts to examine Graham’s outlook towards the mind/body and by extension nature/culture dichotomies in her poetry. The previous studies on the Sea Change collection have mostly focused on Graham’s formal structures and ecological concerns; no other research has used Kristeva’s theories to examine the importance of one’s embodied experience of the world in her poetry to reveal how negative attitudes towards the body lead to a fractured existence for the human subject. Graham’s poetic language addresses the neglect to which the semiotic has been subjected, redefines the body in terms that are not abject and opens up a safe cultural space for it. Her poetry illuminates how mystification and degradation of the body have a positive correlation with oppression of the nature, as concepts belonging to similar dichotomous lines of thought, and highlights the call for a re-evaluation of the attitudes towards the human subject’s existence in the world.