ABSTRACT
Espen Dahl’s “Weakness and Passivity: Phenomenology of the Body After Paul” starts out by pointing out how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty rely on bodily activity as constitutive for subjectivity and our world-relation, a relationship captured by the phrase “I can.” However fruitful such accounts are, taking the active and well-functioning body as the norm confronts limitations when faced with the broken body, in the case of illness, weakness or other forms of dysfunctions. Arguably, there is an activist bias buried in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, which prevents them from giving a satisfying phenomenological description of “I cannot.” Taking the lead from St. Paul’s description of his “thorn in the flesh,” Dahl suggests that there is a sense of received power of life, which manifests itself most purely in the passive state. Such received power can, furthermore, be elucidated by Michel Henry’s account of life, which in no way denies human activity—the “I can”—but claims that its source of origin lies not in the active ego, but in a radical passivity that finds itself receiving the powers of life.
