Body initiation

Existential Analytics Versus Mama

Embodiment

Body initiation

Pregnancy, birth and motherhood are radical experiences of the body which alter the mother's concept of life and her psychic status. The extreme experiences of motherhood unavoidably make the ontological and cultural disciplines that have been given us to-date appear non-obligatory, even incidental. This experience initiates the female body, attests to its existence, and reveals a being beyond the limits of the subject. We are unable to sense what happens in the pregnant body; it is a friendly, but independent, process. We could know that something is going on, but we don't know what it is and we are not able to perceive it; the only knowledge of this process is an assumption of what is possible. There are existential givens which can be deduced from motherhood (for example, the continuity of life which develops the body to the point where it is capable of reproduction; the personal corporeality continued in one's children; the mother's transcorporeality; the immanence of life and the impossibility of perceptively certifying and consistently representing it in each instance). These givens about motherhood provoke us to model a potentially fluid and fragmentary ontology capable of incorporating the body of pregnancy and motherhood, which is generally little understood by philosophical discourse. The mother's pregnant body aspires to immutability and constancy in historical time while the relationship of mother and child is suprahistorical. Although it is considered taboo and rendered invisible in certain ages, it is made explicit in others. Pregnancy is equally both a marginal and a matrixial model of culture.

The existential foundations of this discourse are reliably masked by the non-verbal and the unconscious. These are reflected in their own feedback system, which appears as the conceptual aim of discourse; as such they introduce both the individual body and the subject into philosophical discourse. The discursive model for existential analytic is the Heideggerian catalog of existential ‘categories' which exposes and strains the vital possibilities of the existing subject. The Heideggerian catalog of existential modes provides a complete outline of the noble Protestant subject's existence: death, conscience, care, decisiveness....

Death is the principal, supporting, existential instance in this catalog. Death includes the value of life, while at the same time it localizes the subject in its body. Death demonstrates the separateness and isolation of the body/subject, which becomes its drama and forces it to assume transcendental and ontological responsibility, to disdain the mortal body (which is not able to give birth or be reborn). This hypertrophied subject, which makes absolute its own transcendental capability, becomes the complementary substitute of the mortal body. In this way death is posited by Heidegger as the fundamental existential motif and death constantly returns him to (or encloses him in) the vicious circle of a transcendental ontology. This forces Heidegger to return to a Kantian discourse and to re-read Kant as the creator of an ontology of the transcendental subject based on the knowledge of personal temporality and mortality.

What happens to the subject of the pregnant body? In this scheme, either it collapses, crushing and flattening itself, childishly falling under the sway of medical or pedagogical, religious or ideological, family or social discourses. Or, just the opposite: an expansion takes place, an escape beyond the limits of the disciplinary and the discursively prescribed into the otherworldly space of culture. In the intentional focus of the "pregnant subject" extraperceptual and hyperperceptual objects are illuminated. Strictly speaking, hyperperceptual objects are no longer objects, but states in which the corresponding catalogs are presented. Extraperceptual objects are possible objects whose reality is verified only by their possibility but it is always first and foremost the object status which disappears.

In this scenario, what can be deduced from the subject-object dimension? For this is where subject and object are distributed as internal and external to each other. The external object is conceived as an empirical thing and as something projected by an intentional subject. The subject's place is occupied by the production of life and understood as a cooperative, unhurried process controlled through participation. If we participate well, then this process proceeds successfully; if we make shabby work of it, breakdowns are unavoidable.

If we adhere to the traditional logic of discourse, when we remove the subject-object dimensions of philosophical discourse, we also call into question the perceptual-representative mechanism prescribed to us as its gnosiological!gnostic support.

In this model of Western philosophy, life is not grasped by our perceptual potential; it moves along all by itself; uncontrolled by our perception. Perception works like a filter which has the right to legitimate certain objects and to not admit those that seem perceptually unconvincing. The subject's perceptual filter decides which objects have the right to exist and to occupy a place in the picture of the world as objects or subjects. Consequently, since they are neither perceived nor represented, pregnancy and embryonality are not possible; in so far as they are neither object nor subject.

But if we reject perception as an essential gnosiological link, we could assume that life is a given, something independent of empirical control. Life is that which comes into being by itself and is potentially only verified by my active participation. This participation is determined neither by desire nor by attraction: it is a given and immanent in itself- but the body becomes its home. When we correlate the event of procreation with the transcendental subject, then either procreation turns out to be invisible, or else the subject disappears. The subject is completed only where the mechanism of stagnation and formalization is essential. As a subject, I can halt the process of life, but perhaps only as a body immanent in existence can I set or control it.

Representation here also loses its self-identity and becomes only the possibility of representation. All possible representations (the catalog of representations) create the measure or diapason and mood for the actual occurrence of any one representation.

Representation becomes a database segment; the possibility of existential self-realization, a program or a user interface. It is this which also determines both the limits and the courage of the users: mother and child exist only in the existential expanses of self-incarnation.

IN this process the subject cannot become unified, insofar as the subject's various manifestations are not identical to one another; they do not come together within a single functional and ontological process. A transcendental synthesis is not only impossible; in principle, it is unnecessary. Thus many of the disciplines linked to the typical disciplinary formation of the transcendental subject (education and rearing) become incorrect: the child educates and rears itself. The task of the mother is to establish operative functions, open the informational catalog, and demonstrate navigation. Though the mother does not control information choice, she does control operational intensity and regularity. The mother does not produce the subject in the child; nor does she produce the subject of social systems. Tfthese functions do arise, then they are traditionally prescribed to society, authority or the father. In this way it could be said that the mother sets offthe process of the body's seif-realization as its functional guarantee.

Embodiment

In comparison with a narrowly understood politics, economics or science, culture is life's most effective technical means. Culture supplies and prepares our most important tool - the body. How are the functions of sense and thinking established in the body? How is the body represented to itself ifs visual and verbal practices? Culture always equips the body with regulations and with a challenge, a particular mission.

In our classical and modernist tradition the body is something derived, a second or third level of discourse: either as a mechanical derivative of the thinking subject (Descartes' Ego), or as Husserl's binary object, where the capability of perceiving and being perceived is recognized as the body's principal quality. As distinct from logos, intuition, and transcendence, the body is not admitted to any axiomatic or proto-conceptual foundations.

The embodiment of discourse - i.e. the introduction of corporeality as the basis and referee of discourse - alters its foundations. From being an object of perception, the body becomes the generator and user of its own existence. The body is not appropriated; it is saturated with what is immanent in itself. in the form of the socio-cultural subject, one can successfully cooperate with it. Or one can carry out an ethicoaesthetic adaptation: give it an image and description, impose preferable functions (those of a soldier; following Jung, or of a sexual object, following the rules of youth fashion). In this instance it is not the 'transcendental subject" that takes responsibility for Dasein, but the body as the localization of the existential sphere of the possible. The subject becomes a technical means: the subject can mutate, given necessity (or sheer boredom), and in a manner which is functionally serial, not transcendental.

Pregnancy, birth and motherhood/childhood initiate sexual identity and demand many cultural forces that are not reducible to either narrative or model; they are functional, not representative: they generate and admit a number of discursive variations. Sexual initiation takes places in the topos of corporeality, not in that of the subject. Gender is confirmed through the disclosure of its specific possibility: the generation of life, its flow/process, its plurality/seriality. The terms of sexuality, the female body is established not by the identity of body/subject, but because the body is the place where existence happens. The body opens the catalogue (database) of destructured representations and identifications; it utilizes and actualizes them: newly experienced by the body, they acquire an existential basis. We can see sex in existential (not gender) coupling terms; singular body events like pregnancy/ motherhood moreover need to be considered not at the level of the microfunctions of existence, where the body is transsexual, but at a global level.

In this case, the sexual body certifies itself by the fact that it can produce as a body, beyond its perceptual or cognitive substitutes; that is, it can give life to other bodies.

Translated, from the Russian by Thomas Campbell