Here are some notes, digested later on, from this talk:
"Abstract: Phenomenology has insistently contributed to the understanding of the irreducibility of two bodily dimensions: the body-as-subject anchoring one’s first-person perspective, carrying out one’s projects and the body-as-object constrained by its immersion in the material world, scrutinized by others. This presentation will unfold the idea that both these bodily dimensions participate equi-primordially to the constitution of one’s being. This may be shown by considering atypical experiences and practices of bodily self-transformation which may first appear as attempted self-eradication, but which may rather involve a form of constitutive self-negation. Following Reza Negarestani who characterizes decay as a “building process toward exteriority”, a radical subtraction from one’s body of the inert elements common to one’s body-as-object (life) and one’s corpse (death) will here be conceptualized as involving two contemporaneous processes: shedding one’s thing-hood and exposing one’s no-thingness. The former attests to the irreducibility of one’s body-as-subject and one’s body-as-object; the latter attests to their ineradicable intermeshing."
I often stare at myself in the mirror because I am trying to see my subjecthood from the outside, my self as other people see me. The person people seem to like and respect, or what it is that makes things otherwise. What it is about my behaviour that means I don’t find work easily. How I project myself. I am trying to become my outer self, to actualise whatever is it that will allow me to function socially. It is not working very well. I cannot relate to the me that everyone else sees, and I cannot transport myself far enough away to see it. As equally as I dismiss the idea that I am amazing, I am confounded that I have not been hired on the countless job interviews I have attended. What do I do at one time that I do not do at another? All I can see is me. I am occluded by myself. I am self-confident to the point that I don’t show it in the slightest. I am not satisfied with my inner being and yet I seem to show an outer attractiveness. I do not feel like my outside self. It is scary.
Perhaps when I am old I will love myself more. Society will not look at me as thin and young and blonde. I will be more of a person and less of a stereotype. I do not like being thin and young and blonde. I am certainly not the thinnest, youngest or blondest. I do not feel like I am that person. But I am often treated that way, or so it would appear to me, when I am spoken to as if struggling.
What am I? Where do I begin? How can I be the good others see in me, and how can I drown the preconceptions I am mired in?
My diabetes has made me forgive my body many things. My shape is mine, and I do not want to harm it anymore, and I do not crash into things with the dismorphia I once had. To be aware of the body seems to help the mind. But why? I used to long for an entirely spiritual existence, a removal from my desires. I felt the purity it might bring me. But I cannot escape my diseased flesh, so I decide to embrace the rest of it too. It is not so bad. My mind is not unnurtured. I am just lagging behind my desires.
This is also lovely although I have never used Posterous. Learn a new thing eh?
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