The Body of the Other: Hegel on the Relational Structure of Corporeality

Abstract

What role does the body play in the subject’s formation and in interpersonal exchanges? Does the body merely perform an instrumental function, or can it claim to be a subject of freedom? Thinking of the body within the framework of intersubjectivity requires reassessing the bulk of the philosophical Western tradition. Form the first-person’s perspective endorsed by this tradition, the exteriority of the body has been reduced to a weakness of human nature. Starting from Hegel’s account of the soul-body relation, as presented in the Anthropology, as well as some interpretations of “Lordship and Bondage” on the role of the body in self-doubling (Butler, Malabou, McDowell, Stekeler-Weithofer), I argue that embodiment is a process of (inter)subjectivation. Thematizing the predicative structure of corporeality, Hegel turns the constitutive exteriority of the human body into a potentiality of openness. Hence, Hegel’s dialectic of immediacy and mediation leads to thinking of the body’s universality in opposition to a monadic conception of subjectivity.