Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology Tom Sparrow Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology Sensation Rebuilding Plastic Bodies: With a foreword by Catherine Malabou This is the third book by Tom Sparrow, the author Sparrow Tom of Levinas Unhinged (Zero Books, 2013) and The End of Phenomenology (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Whereas most contemporary treatments of phenomenology approach it in a spirit of either servitude or disdain, Sparrow is cut from a different cloth. While deeply sympathetic to the historical aims of phenomenology, Sparrow opposes the first-person orientation of the phenomenological method and its often unsatisfactory account of embodiment. Plastic Bodies aims to reconstruct the unpopular concept of sensation in the wake of the rescue efforts made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Cover design by Katherine Gillieson · Illustration by Tammy Lu Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology New Metaphysics Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys- ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic- continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel- lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter- est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Tom Sparrow Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2015 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2015 Freely available online at Copyright © 2015 Tom Sparrow, Foreword copyright © 2015 Catherine Malabou This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Design by Katherine Gillieson Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2015, used under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY). ISBN-13 978-1-78542-001-6 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents Acknowledgments 9 Abbreviations 11 Foreword: After the Flesh by Catherine Malabou 13 Introduction 21 1. Post-Dualist Embodiment, with Some Theses on Sensation 25 2. Synchronic Bodies and Environmental Orientation 67 3. Perception, Sensation, and the Problem of Violence 111 4. Sensibility, Susceptibility, and the Genesis of Individuals 144 5. On Aesthetic Plasticity 177 Conclusion: Plasticity and Power 219 Notes 237 Works Cited 274 For Fred Evans, tireless activist, teacher, and friend Acknowledgments This project was born at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During my time there I forged many friendships with faculty, staff, and students. Among those relationships several require recognition for the traces they have left on this book. Fred Evans not only taught me how to read Merleau-Ponty, he graciously and patiently helped me refine my central argument through its several iterations. I cannot imagine a more dedicated mentor or companion. Without Dan Selcer I would never have come to see the importance of philosophical method and I would have a much more routine grasp of the history of philosophy. George Yancy offered nothing but encouraging words and careful attention, even when I contacted him without warning at home. His encouragement will never cease. I am indebted to Silvia Benso of the Rochester Institute of Technology for agreeing to review my work on Levinas; her remarks on the text, even when critical, were always enthusiastic. Among my other friends from Duquesne I must single out Pat Craig, John Fritz, Jacob Graham, Adam Hutchinson, Keith Martel, and Ryan Pfahl, all of whom contributed insight into my project and helped me think through its problems. Jim Swindal always was, and always will be, a vigilant advocate for me and the philosophical community at Duquesne. The directors of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, first Dan Martino and now Jeff McCurry, always supported my work and 10 accommodated me at the Center. Graham Harman has played a significant role in the formation of my own philosophical position, and his generous email correspondence from Cairo during the writing of my first draft was much appreciated. Now I thank him for allowing my book to find a home in his and Bruno Latour’s “New Metaphysics” series. With the help of liaison Jon Cogburn, Mark Allan Ohm and Joel Andrepont readily accepted the task of translating Catherine Malabou’s foreword. They did so with much- appreciated swiftness and skill. Finally, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for Open Humanities Press who kindly asked me to craft portions of my text with more care and precision. Thanks to all of you. Abbreviations Texts by Levinas EE Existence and Existents OB Otherwise than Being TI Totality and Infinity TO Time and the Other Texts by Merleau-Ponty Child “The Child’s Relations with Others” CD “Cézanne’s Doubt” EM “Eye and Mind” ILVS “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” Nature Nature PP Phenomenology of Perception PrP “The Primacy of Perception” Shadow “The Philosopher and His Shadow” VI The Visible and the Invisible Foreword After the Flesh by Catherine Malabou Translated by Mark Allan Ohm and Joel Andrepont The body becomes worthy of philosophical examination when it is no longer a question of the body but of my body. Husserl introduces a fundamental distinction between Körper, the objective, anatomico-physiological body, and Leib, one’s own body [le corps propre], the living body, the place of sensations and emotions, the “flesh.” This distinction marks a decisive development in his thinking and saves the body from being merely an object of conceptual devaluation. By rejecting the methods of descriptive psychology in order to establish a transcendental phenomenology, Husserl grants a constitutive role to the “flesh” as lived body.My body must be considered in its individuality, its incarnation or embodiment (Verleiblichung), which amounts to considering the living corporeal body [le vécu corporel] in the purity of its manifestation. My body is a token of my own immediate worldly presence; it presents to the mind what Husserl calls hyletic data (the body’s perceptual, sensory content, like touch, look, voice, kinaesthesia). In this way, the body becomes the worldly presence of an intentional subject’s mental life. The phenomenological body stands in the sphere of immanence (the sensation that I have of my body’s immediate presence in the world), a sphere which, after the epoché, is reduced to the presence of the thing itself. 14 Catherine Malabou Sensation means that the thing reveals itself in the flesh and stands there before our eyes as something given to itself and in actuality. The Husserlian analyses of the living corporeal body once again mark a major advancement in the history of philosophy. As a result of these analyses, the body, quite simply, acquires a value equal to that of the mind. The mind is no longer separable from the flesh that it animates and which gives it corporeal spatiality. We can therefore ask whether it is possible to go further in this recognition of the essential status of the incarnate body than phenomenology does. It seems not. Even researchers in the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind still draw from Husserl: Francisco Varela, Alva Noë, Evan Thompson, and Shaun Gallagher, to name but a few, situate their work within his direct lineage. Is the phenomenological approach to the body impossible to overcome? In an incredibly daring gesture, Tom Sparrow responds in the negative, and attempts to clear the way for nothing less than a post-phenomenological approach to the body. Sparrow is clearly well aware of the considerable debt that continental philosophy owes to phenomenology. Phenomenology made possible several claims about the body: that it is not the case that the body is the tomb of the soul, as Plato claimed; that it is not the case that the body is a neutral extension caught in the movement which animates it, as Descartes showed; and that the body is much more than the place of sensibility, as Kant defined it. In fact, the senses always grasp things as they are for the consciousness that perceives them. It is in this way that corporeal space acquires its identity within the general realm of extension [l’étendue générale]. Thus there is no a priori spatial body. Despite