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In his seminal work The Spell of the Sensuous<\/em>, philosopher and ecologist David Abram argues that modern humans have become used to thinking of the natural world as a passive entity on which they must operate dispassionately. The actio<\/em>\/passio<\/em> polarity that defines the sovereign\u2019s right to exception\u2014to act or suffer the consequences of the acts of others (1.7<\/a>)\u2014also defines the attitude of our civilization towards the natural world. According to Abram,<\/p>\n\n\n\n we conceptually immobilize or objectify the phenomenon only by mentally absenting ourselves from this relation, by forgetting or repressing our sensuous involvement. To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being<\/em>. By linguistically defining the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Our existence in the world is or, at least should be, a dialogue with it, not the appalling monologue we have sustained since the time of Descartes. This dialogue, which involves the communication between psyche and world, is one of the ways to stabilize the tensions inherent in the inside\/outside polarity of the human mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Abram dedicates the bulk of his book to the different ways in which humans have achieved a profound communication with their natural environment, taking as his starting point an idea developed by French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty: the flesh of the world<\/em>. This concept, unprecedented in the history of Western thought,<\/p>\n\n\n\n is a mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own spontaneous activity. It is the reciprocal presence of the sentient in the sensible and the sensible in the sentient, a mystery of which we have always, at least tacitly, been aware, since we have never been able to affirm one of these phenomena, the perceivable world or the perceiving self, without implicitly affirming the existence of the other.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The relationship of the human with its own body is essential for Merleau-Ponty\u2019s phenomenology, an emphasis that sets him apart it from most of the philosophy of his time. In his work notes for The Visible and the Invisible<\/em>, a book his early death left unfinished, we read:<\/p>\n\n\n\n to touch is to touch oneself. To be understood as: the things are the prolongation of my body and my body is the prolongation of the world, through it the world surrounds me\u2014\u2014if I can touch this movement, this movement is entirely woven out of contact with me\u2014\u2014The touching oneself and the touching have to be understood as each the reverse of the other.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Body and world are specular images. However, for Merleau-Ponty the inside of the world is not a mere \u2018psychic state,\u2019 it is \u201cintra-corporeal, reverse of the outside that my body shows to the things.\u201d One of the best pictorial approximations of this inversion is found in the work of Francis Bacon which, in the words of Bernardo Bertolucci, consisted mostly of \u201cfaces eaten by something coming from the inside.\u201d (3.3.1<\/a>) In Bacon\u2019s portraits the human face becomes a representation of intra-corporeality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul Eluard once said of his wife Gala (who would later marry Salvador Dal\u00ed): \u201cher body is the shape of my hands.\u201d The latent interiority of this image contains the essence of all the flesh.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n En su obra seminal La magia de los sentidos, el fil\u00f3sofo y ec\u00f3logo David Abram argumenta que los humanos modernos nos hemos acostumbrado a pensar en el mundo natural como una entidad pasiva sobre la cual debemos operar desapasionadamente. La polaridad actio\/passio que define el derecho de excepci\u00f3n del soberano \u2014actuar o sufrir la consecuencias […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":274836558,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"David Abram, La magia de los sentidos<\/em>, 64.\",\"id\":\"00592ad9-8430-4368-a269-c861a4cfb8c3\"},{\"content\":\"Ib\u00edd., 74.\",\"id\":\"43f9d811-4521-4813-b4ee-ca76bb65166b\"},{\"content\":\"Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lo visible y lo invisible<\/em>, 225.\",\"id\":\"03ef60ad-e187-4fb4-9b76-823704fe1ad8\"}]","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[786109237],"tags":[786109242,786109243,786109245,786109246,786109244],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitulo-4","tag-david-abram","tag-la-magia-de-los-sentidos","tag-merlau-ponty","tag-paul-eluard","tag-spell-of-the-sensuous"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgYHfz-cv","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/274836558"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":778,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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