ABSTRACT
But isn't the body real?—the body “proper” is a name for the family of idiolects. It is, moreover, the referent of phrases obeying various regimens. My teeth hurt: this is a descriptive, paired with a co-presented request: Relieve me of this. The dentist turns your suffering into a case that verifies a cognitive phrase…In relation to this case, and by way of an answer to your request, the dentist prescribes certain actions proper to re-establishing your health (health being itself the object of an Idea). The same goes for other professions of the “body” mutatis mutandis: for the sports coach, for the sex therapist, for the culinary artist, for the dance or singing teacher, for the military instructor, the body is a set of symptoms read and treated on the basis of an Idea of the good body.—But the toothache is painful, it's a lived experience, etc.!—How can you verify that it is a lived experience? You are the exclusive addressee of this pain. It is like the voice of God: “You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed… Wittgenstien adds: “That is a grammatical remark.” It circumscribes what an idiolect is: “I” am alone in hearing it. The idiolect easily falls beneath the blows of the dilemma: if your lived experience is not communicable, you cannot testify that it exists; if it is communicable, you cannot say that you are the only one able to testify that it exists. (Lyotard, 83–84)
