ABSTRACT
There are several reasons why corporeality, or the topic of the body, arises as a theme at this point. After some preliminary considerations regarding the self or the inner life in the previous chapter, interiority needs to be examined more closely through the ways in which it is actually experienced. When Levinas examines the sphere of interiority in Totality and Infi nity, his analyses are all more or less connected to the body. Admittedly, he talks less explicitly about the body than about need, enjoyment, happiness, and the elements, and so on. Yet all of these involve the body in some fashion. Therefore corporeality as a more general philosophical subject shall be broached here, before turning to the more specifi cally Levinasian topics of enjoyment and suffering in the next chapter. Furthermore, the body belongs to those themes which are mentioned on a regular basis as an argument against Plato’s philosophy. Most well-known in this context is Plato’s claim in the Phaedo that the body constitutes a prison for the soul (Phaedo 82e). But even Levinas might appear to neglect or underestimate the role of the body, ignoring the accomplishments of phenomenologists such as Husserl or Merleau-Ponty. Yet it will turn out that neither Plato nor Levinas ignore the body. A fi nal reason for examining corporeality, which can only be substantiated much later, concerns the way in which the ambiguity inherent in the erotic, artistic, and political domains is based on the materiality of these phenomena which is rooted in our existence as embodied, vulnerable beings.
