Guest Speaker: “Does the Body Exist? Deconstruction and Phenomenology”, Claude Romano (Australian Catholic University)

Abstract:

The idea of deconstruction as formulated by Heidegger (before Derrida and differently from him) implies to question the provenance of our concepts in order to bring out ways of relating to phenomena that have been concealed by a received and crystallized conceptuality. I would like to illustrate this idea from a significant example: the notion of body. It seems obvious to us that the human being possesses something like a “body” that can be separated from the other part that constitutes it, the spirit or the psyche. However, at the beginning of Western thought, there was probably nothing that could be called “the body”. In presenting the way in which this notion has taken shape, we would like to ask ourselves what it would be like to have a phenomenology of our embodied existence that would not take this distinction for granted. By the same token, I would like to illustrate the relevance of a historical and narrative approach to philosophical problems for the practice of philosophy itself.