Doubling

My physical body, prepersonal and anonymous, folds into my personal sphere. Doing so, I experience a shudder at the very fact that I have body, with its own organs, most of which are concealed from my visual sight. Yet I feel them. My body is inside of me, its contours, ranges, and vistas visible beneath the surface of skin. My heart beats and I see its rhythm pulse in the upper area of my chest. But my body does not end with the materiality of my own flesh. When I remove my clothes, then a part of my body remains cocooned within the fabric of those clothes, my flesh interwoven with wool and and mohair. When I am walking, I see other people walking, too. These other people have bodies, the inside of which a similar landscape to my own exists. We are bound by our shared organs. Bound together through the human physiology, yet isolated by the very experience of those organs.

“Round about the perceived body a vortex forms, toward which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in” (Merleau-Ponty). At the heart of the vortex is the doubling of the body. I am not transparency. Rather, something takes place inside of me, such that I am alive. But this force-world is not me, as such: it is the “alien life” that inhabits the kernel of my being, diffusing a mysterious fog around the very facticity of existence. And how should I respond to this alien fog? After all, its presence is not coincidental with my visual experience of things. When asleep, my body remains animated even though my visual sight is diminished. Does my body "watch over me"? In this mode, things take over; the personal body draws into the background. Am I automated by this “alien life”? Am I the counterpart to my own double, of whom I only catch sight of in passing?