L’appartenance. Vers une théorie de la chair

Abstract

English title: Belonging. Towards a theory of flesh.

This paper aims at showing that our lived body (chair, Leib), which is one of the most important topics of phenomenology, is not so much a question as an answer, answer to a question that remains implicit: that of belonging. It is not for having a body that we belong to the world; on the contrary, we have a body in so far as we belong to the world. Moreover, if the world is that which contains everything, in such a way that an existence out of the world is meaningless, we must conclude that any being belongs to the world and that the difference betweeen beings refers to their way of belonging. But, in so far as any belonging involves a ground, a philosophy of belonging leads out into a phenomenology of space, that distinguishes as many spaces as ways of belonging. Accordingly, the problem raised by the lived body is the following: what is the way of belonging of that being thanks to which the world itself appears?