Volume 4, Issue Part 1, 2007
Selected Essays from Northern Europe Part 1
Annette Hilt
Pages 319-341
A Shared Carnal Humanity
The Language of Proximity in Body, World and Alterity
Human being considered as enigmatic relation to itself and the world centers in carnality. The carnal body as constituent of life is a challenge for our categories of human life, since its own self-awareness backs away from conceptualization. Along with carnality as a theme speaking in Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’ implicit dialogue, this article considers a “shared” carnal humanity given in sensual proximity, language and the diachronic style of alterity. Thus, carnality might be a threshold between ontology and ethics, where traces of Levinas’ and Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts might intertwine in structures of being together in a world.