The Body and Shame by Dolezal Luna

Author:Dolezal, Luna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Merleau-Ponty suggests that it would be more accurate to characterize alienation as arising from objectification as one example, among perhaps many, that can characterize intersubjective encounters: “This is true: this objectivation [sic] by the look is a profound truth . . . But it is a particular case of a more general relation.”[12]

Other commentators also suggest that there are many other modes of relating which don’t necessarily lead to objectification and alienation or a dichotomizing struggle between subject and object. For example, Marjorie Grene suggests that there are many situations where the Look is not threatening; she asks us to consider the “rare but still indubitable experience of mutual understanding, of the reciprocal look of peers; or the look of mother and infant, where the one protects and the other is protected.”[13] There are countless instances where an encounter with the other leads to what Leder terms “mutual incorporation.”[14] He writes: “As long as the Other treats me as subject—that is, experiences with me the world in which I dwell, mutual incorporation effects no sharp rift.”[15] In this vein, van den Berg offers an account of the “accepting look” of the Other which “gives me the almost exceptional right to be myself as a moving body.”[16] Moreover, the sociologist Erving Goffman likewise offers a description of social interaction that is not self-conscious, denoting this experience as “euphoric interplay,”[17] arguing that there are many occasions that people are “unoriented to and unconcerned about being under observation.”[18]

In addition to these qualifications to the negative articulation of the Look, there are other theorists that argue that ontologically our relations with others are characterized by an ethical opening, rather than an antagonistic struggle between subjectification and objectification. Notably, Emmanuel Levinas develops this line of thought in his phenomenological ethics, arguing that the pure alterity of the Other can never be assimilated or reduced to an object for the self. Ultimately, Levinas’s project is to articulate an ethics which puts ethical responsibility, as arising from the encounter with the Other, as integral to subjectivity.[19] Rosalyn Diprose likewise argues that at the level of prereflective intercorporeality, our relations with others are characterized by generosity, rather than antagonism. Generosity, Diprose argues, “is a being given that constitutes the self as affective and being affected [and] that constitutes social relations.”[20] Diprose invokes Merleau-Ponty’s claim that through perception, agency and subjectivity the body is ‘open’ to the bodies of others and this openness constitutes a corporeal generosity, a to-and-froing of embodied exchanges.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.