THE ONTOLOGY OF THE BODY

What, then, about the body? Could there be an existential-ontological meaning to the body? Does my body pertain to my existence, to my being, to my “Z am", owing to which it should therefore be included in an ontological-existential philosophical analysis? Or does body merely characterize beings that already are, and not their Being? Furthermore, is the body “mine” in the same sense that Being is “mine? Do I “have” my own death and my own body in a fundamentally different way than I have my own money, for instance? That I cannot in principle jettison them, give them up, circumvent them, nor exchange them for new ones marks them as occupying a different ontological status in relation to me (Carman, 2015). Heidegger’s existential analysis in Being and Time does not include a discussion of the ontology of the body, and in order to answer these questions, one has to go beyond Heidegger, looking instead to post-Heideggerian philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others. For these thinkers, the body is not a material coat of arms,

nor a Cartesian res extensa (extended substance, namely, the body), existing partes extra partes with the thinking substance (namely, the mind).' Nor, thereby, is the body a container of sense or meaning. Rather, “bodies are existence, the very act of ex-sistence, being' (Nancy, 2008, p. 19). In other words, the body boasts existential significance to the extent that our very existence—our being—cannot be understood without also analyzing the meaning of embodied existence.

The ontology of the body rests on the assumption that embodiment for the type of being that we ourselves are is different from the embodiment of other types of beings. Or to put it in non-Heideggerian terms: embodiment for human beings is different from that of animals, as well as from the materialism of inanimate objects and the “stuff’ from which trees and flowers are composed. As beings defined by' their relationship to their Being—as beings who in fact ask the question of Being—arguing that the body holds an ontological significance, that the body' is not a quality' added to existence but rather that the “w” is itself bodily, is already’ to say why Daseins relationship with its body is different from other type of entities’ embodiment. The ontology of the body' is thus primarily an exploration of the meaning of existence as bodily, since the body' is, as Nancy' claims in Corpus, “ontology itself”, and “the Being of existence” (Nancy, 2008, p. 15).

But what is distinct about our ontological mode of embodiment? Human beings’ embodiment is ontologically distinct insofar as the question of the Being of the body presents itself for Dasein as the question of the body of the mind’s being. In other words, the ontology of the body is essentially the ontology of what, in Cartesian terms, we would call “the union”. It makes no sense, writes Jean-Luc Nancy; “to talk about body and thought apart from each other, as if each could somehow subsist on their own” (p. 37). From this perspective, the mind-body relation is not something that is added to existence. To the contrary, it is existence. In Belief and the Body, Pierre Bourdieu, moreover, argues that “the body believes in what it play's at: it weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 73).