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10 By Way of Body Kant, Whitehead, Husserl, Merleau-Panty Even our judgments about the cosmic regions are subordinated to the concept we have of regions in general, insofar as they are determined in relation to the sides of the body. -Immanuel Kant, "Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space" Far from my body's being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body. -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerception The body, the alterations of which are my alterations -this body is my body; and the place of that body is at the same time my place. -Immanuel Kant, "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics" The most effective way to appreciate the importance of place again is not to approach it as a total phenomenon, to compare its virtues en bloc to those of space in a single systematic treatment. Such a totalizing treatment would lead to nothing but vacant generalities. What is needed is a new and quite particular 202 By Way of Body 203 way into place, a means of reconnecting with it in its very idiosyncrasy. Given the crushing monolith of space in the modern era, the best return to place is through what Freud calls a "narrow defile" I-not, however, the defile of dream (which is what Freud had in mind) but that of body. Place rediscovered by means of body? This will strike the skeptical reader as a most unlikely possibility. Yet in the end the most propitious clues are often those that are least obvious and that hang, like loose threads, from the mysterious mass to be explored. The Leitfaden, the guiding thread, needs to be at once easily accessible and, in its very looseness, followed with facility into the least crevice , the darkest corner, of a problematic phenomenon.2 Such a thread is provided by the body in the case of place. If we are surprised at this clue, it is only because one of the main agendas of philosophical modernity is the subordination of all discrete phenomena to mind. The "new way of ideas" introduced by Descartes and thinkers of the next century had for its most immediate effect the subsumption of every sensible appearance (indeed, all appearances, including those belonging to states of mind) under a representation whose status is unremittingly mental. For any appearance whatsoever to be apprehended it must assume the format of a representation ("idea," "apperception," Vorstellung, etc.), and the sum total of representations is considered to make up Mind itself. This panrepresentationalism takes in not only every particular phenomenon-every substance and every quality, primary or secondary-but also the universe (Kant speaks of "status repraesentatus universi" in "Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces") and even space and time themselves, which on Kant's assessment we represent to ourselves, along with their contents. Thus we reach the paradoxical point noted at the end of the last chapter: space, the very basis of the perception of a permanent external world, is itself based on mind. Or, rather, in mind: for there exists, as Kant says expressly, "in the mind an outer intuition which precedes the objects themselves, and in which the concept of these objects can be determined a priori." 3 Even when it concerns space, that is, outer sense, Kant's transcendentalism is first and foremost a mentalism in the form of a pure intuitionism. Thus it comes as something of a shock to learn that it is Kant himself who proposes an alternative route to place that circumvents mind and representation alike, and all the more shocking given that place is part of the very world of appearances whose status is held to be representational. The new way of ideas is undercut-or at least suspended-as recourse is taken to what had been almost entirely neglected by the subjective idealists of the previous century and a half: the living human body.4 Instead of misplaced concreteness, there is a return to the concrete basis of mental representations themselveswhose abstracted sensuous content calls for a corporeal foundation. Place demands such a foundation even more insistently. The qualitative character of place had been recognized by Leibniz even as his concern for precise 204 The Reappearance of Place positionality acted to quantify place into site. The more we reflect on place, however, the more we recognize it to be something not merely characterizable...

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