ABSTRACT
What does it mean to have a body? This is what might be called an intellectualist question. It is the sort of question critically scrutinized by William Connolly when he investigates the complex interrelationships of sensation, affect, thought, and the movement of our bodies through time and in space. Each of the thinkers who accompany Connolly on this investigation has a distinctive grounding tone that contributes to their varying emphases on psychology, religion, economy, and politics. But they are similar to each other in that they offer complementary ways of configuring embodiment that are attuned to the complexity of our presence in the world; they understand our receptivity, to use Emerson’s term, as prior to, and an impetus for, the more abstract claims we make concerning an essence of our existence. They refigure the question of embodiment from asking what it means to ‘have’ a body to asking how it is that we are embodied, how that embodiment expresses itself in our lives and the lives of others. Reflection upon our states of embodiment in a way that allows us to evade
the trap of Cartesianism – it is through the Cartesian thought experiment that we have become ghostly to ourselves, with our disembodied minds and doubt of our existence – is identified with a tradition of thought that begins with Spinoza, leads to Deleuze, and becomes an explicit task for political theory in the recent work of Connolly. Overcoming ghostliness, learning how to be present in the present – engaged with others while aware of oneself – all of these seemingly minimal instructions for living with each other, require much more of us than many of us seem able to imagine. All of these ethical sanctions have been associated as well with an idea of moral perfectionism developed in the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, most explicitly in his recent book of pedagogical letters, Cities of Words (2004). Relying on Emerson, Cavell suggests that moral perfectionism entails the ongoing quest for each of us to overcome our lack of presence in order to advance forward, to attend to our ‘unattained but attainable self ’. The ethical sanctions urged upon us by Cavell seem to me to inform profoundly Connolly’s ethical task as well, for the politics of becoming involves the same need to engage, to be present, to converse with others.
