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2 Embodiment The Body as Touching-Touched People can hurt us. A woman alone at night can be grabbed by a man on the street; she can be beaten and raped and left paralyzed or pregnant or syphilitic. A police officer can use the threat of hurting that is implied by his gun and uniform to get an innocent and intimidated black man to bow and grovel. A boy can be sodomized by his father every day for years without having any capacity to challenge or escape this invasion. A mother can slap or spank her child when the child cries in distress. Indeed , that we live in this structure of being open to the invasions of stronger others is one of our earliest discoveries. We have other early discoveries, of course. Freud argues that we first experience the world through the mouth: the child at the breast experiences making a connection that lets a flow start and discovers that warm, wet, and tasty happens. In such early experiences we discover that we are open to pleasure. Over the course of our development, our pleasureseeking grows more complex, especially in that we become more active in our pursuits. This development of activity and complexity in our pursuit of pleasure is equally the development by which we come to have a progressively more sophisticated sense of ourselves and of our world. Both of these structures, being open to being hurt and being open to the pursuit of pleasure, are structures of embodiment. It is as bodies that we can be invaded, and it is as bodies that we can act in the world. It is as embodied that we can touch and be touched. Our bodies are the determinateness , the specificity, of our existence: the body is the point where each of us is something specific. To be a body is to be a specific identity that is open to involvement with others. Indeed, pleasure and pain are the two faces of this involvement, the ways in which that with which we are involved either welcomes or hinders our determinacy. Our bodies are the living processes by which we establish contact with reality. 21 By being the point of contact of ourselves and our world, our embodiment is also our being public: it is as bodies that we are visible, tangible, and tasteable by others. Our embodiment is where we show ourselves, where our specificity is open to the judgment of others. The vulnerability to the violent ingress of the armed attacker that is characteristic of the body is mirrored by the psychological vulnerability that comes with our being on public display. The body is the point of intersubjective contact: the point where who we are cannot be concealed and cannot be held to be a matter of private interpretation, the site of shame and pride, of intimidation and seduction. Trespass, pleasure, shame, seduction: these and other such terms are the ones that name the terrain of embodiment. Fundamentally, the body is our participation in these realities. These terms identify the logical components that are definitive of embodiment, and it is in these terms that the body must be understood. These terms—trespass, pleasure, shame, and seduction—name ways that we in our very identities are sensitive to what is outside us. Being sensitive—being the possibility for experience—is the essence of the body. We are beings who are sensitive to our environments; we care about how we stand with others, and our relations with others affect us—we feel our placement within the world. These feelings take place at many levels: we can be affected at a very immediate and superficial level by the shape and texture of some mass or at a very intimate level by how another’s sense of our worth touches our self-estimation. These layers of relation—these feelings—are the way the body exists. To be a body is to be open to noticing how we stand with others—to have others already influencing, already inside our experience . By virtue of being bodies, how we stand with others matters to us, which means that it is as a bodily involvement with another that we are invaded, that we are satisfied, that we are embarrassed, and that we enchant . This involvement is the experience of being engaged with others, of already being open to their influence and being able to influence them. As...

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