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23 CHAPTER TWO The Body What makes the body “the most difficult problem”? More to the point, what does this problem have to do with trash? I have suggested that trash materially manifests our failure at being human and that, when properly understood, this phenomenon unambiguously exhibits our existential shortcomings. Such an understanding reveals trash as a denial of our essential finitude. To put it otherwise, trash results from the attempted process of negating human finitude. Since the difficulty of the body lies in its finite nature—its mortality—the phenomenon of trash comes to appear as the negation or effacement of the human body. It would seem, then, that trash is unproblematic in itself because it represents the dissolution of the problem of embodiment. This last is, however, a metaphysical conclusion. It explains the common unconcern on the part of the consumer society for the real physical perils of its pollution. Technological humanity, mistaking trash as the solution to the problem of physicality, continues to produce increasing amounts of it. The consumer of technology tacitly believes trash helps rather than hinders the fulfillment of her being. How could trash help metaphysical consumers? It distracts us from our bodies. If waste implies human failure and imperfection, and, furthermore, if waste bears close associations with our animal matter, then the predominance of trash over waste seems to signal reason’s triumph over the body. Trash—objects presupposed as essentially disposable—results from a willful human determination concerning the being of the object. Trash flatters our delusive fantasy of omnipotence. Waste, on the other hand, affronts reason with the unhappy recognition of its own ultimate impotence in the face of physicality. In this chapter, I begin the task of interpreting the paradoxical, unrecognized motivation that produces trash: we create trash to deny waste. Of course, as individual consumers going about our daily lives, we do not think of trash in this manner. In fact, qua consumers, we barely think about trash at all and feel quite at ease with this state of thoughtlessness . Because trash increases the GDP of industrialized nations it is considered productive. But this, as I will argue, dissembles the true educational nature of trash. The productive and the educative perspectives on trash clash irreconcilably. Existentially, trash is unproblematic to the extent that it calls attention to our own neglect of our proper embodied existence. Only when trash serves as the souvenir of our finitude does it pose no problems. This requires, however, a radical ontological interpretation of the phenomenon. In the last chapter, two important quotes were cited without sufficient comment. Zimmerman let it be known that “we become ourselves when we let beings be.”1 If the being of trash is a sign of our own failure at being human, then this should be seen in a general inability to let beings be. I have just implied that trash itself is not allowed fully to be in the consumer society, where its essential didactic function succumbs to occlusion beneath unexamined habits of thought and action. Almost all other phenomena, however, share this fate of disappearance, which strikes first at our physicality. If “Being needs man as the there of its openness in order to open itself,”2 that is, if finitude plays an essential role in the occurrence of Being, then the body must stand as the intermediary between Being and beings. This chapter, consequently, is a positive exploration of how the body relates to beings, human being, and Being as such. At the same time, it is a negative interpretation of the effacement of the body as the cause of trash. Two demonstrations of these relationships are possible: one fashioned out of Heidegger’s skeletal remarks on embodiment and the other gleaned from a critique launched against Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology. As the second is less involved, I will begin with it. Needs of the Body According to Emmanuel Levinas, Heidegger’s preoccupation with ontology blinded him to the more radical fundamentality of ethics. Levinas argues that the true being of the Other encountering me as a human face eludes both ontic and ontological comprehension, which is a kind of possessive grasping, and instead elicits a receptive acknowledgment, which is a kind of caress. Each face is irreducible in its particularity and uniqueness, leaving the understanding, which operates with universals, empty-handed. This means that we do not, through our interpretative circumspection and 24 AN ONTOLOGY OF TRASH [3.138.120.17] Project MUSE...

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