The Growing Solitude of the Body

Abstract

The paper suggests that while the body is the impassable frontier between us and the Other, it is at the same time a privileged means for recognizing our own and the Other’s vulnerability and fragility. The body, however, is growing more solitary in the post human times that we are entering. Interactions with others rely less and less on corporeal presence. Abstract mediated contact is becoming the norm and is frequently favoured as a more convenient and liberating form of sociability. But are there fundamental differences between these modalities of presence—the virtual one and the full physical presence—that deserve attention? This paper argues, drawing on phenomenological analyses by Husserl and Patočka and on insights from Nietzsche, that a growing ‘solitude of the body’ is reverberating into a gradual absence of the Other and that this phenomenon is translating into narrower and more subjectively defined notions of community and common world. The suggestion here is that Patočka’s call for a phenomenology of corporeity is ever more pressing and relevant.