ABSTRACT
Habits are often described as resulting from a form of sedimentation of our embodied encounters with the world. But what about the skeleton? It has its proper form of “appearing”. By haunting our being-in-the-world, we experience its weight from within as a form of presence that cannot be reabsorbed or dissolved into our lived experiences of things around us. If habits are resulting from these intentional encounters, the skeleton implies a form of self-affirmation prior to it. Its “dry, imperturbable, hard and intransigent” presence imposes on our behaviors a form of identity that haunts our being the way certain traits of ancestors transmit themselves from generation to generation. That past haunts our habits the same way the skeleton haunts our flesh.
