The Synthesis of One's Own Body

The analysis of bodily spatiality has led us to results that can be generalized. We observe for the first time with regard to one's own body what is true of all perceived things: the perception of space and the perception of the thing, or the spatiality of the thing and its being as a thing, are not two distinct problems. The Cartesian and Kantian tradition already teaches us this – it turns spatial determinations into the very essence of the object and it shows existence partes extra partes and the spatial distribution to be the only possible sense of existence in itself. But this tradition clarifies the perception of the object through the perception of space, whereas the experience of one's own body teaches us to root space within existence. Of course, intellectualism sees that the “thing-motif” and the “space-motif”¹ intertwine, but it reduces the former to the latter. Experience reveals, beneath the objective space in which the body eventually finds its place, a primordial spatiality of which objective space is but the envelope and which merges with the very being of the body. As we have seen, to be a body is to be tied to a certain world, and our body is not primarily in space, but is rather of space.² Persons suffering from anosognosia who 150speak of their arm as a long and cold “serpent”³ are not, strictly speaking, unaware of its objective contours, and even when the patient looks for his arm without finding it or fastens it in order not to lose it,⁴ he surely knows where his arm is, since that is precisely where he looks for it and where he fastens it. If, however, the patients experience [éprouvent] the space of their arm as strange, and if I can in general sense the space of my body as enormous or as tiny despite the evidence of my senses, this is because there is an affective presence and extension of which objective spatiality is neither the sufficient condition, as is shown in anosognosia, nor even the necessary condition, as is shown by the phantom limb. The spatiality of the body is the deployment of its being as a body, and the manner in which it is actualized as a body. By seeking to analyze it, we thus did nothing but anticipate what we have to say concerning bodily synthesis in general.