Organic Repression

Our work is archaeological, and our body is “more ancient than thought.” There is a human body, and it has been forced to survive for tens of millions of years on the planet Earth. The survival has not only been a case of physical persistence through different continents, time-zones, and landscapes: it has also been an issue of dwelling alongside a prehistoric body, which is both human and inhuman concurrently. How has (in)human life achieved this? The key has been in the term, “organic repression.” The phrase binds the late work of Freud with the early work of Merleau-Ponty. It appears several times in Civilization and its Discontents and at least once in Phenomenology of Perception. The term is critical for both thinkers. Talking of the body’s refusal to accept mutilation, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “an organic repression” (89). By it, he refers to the body’s ability to augment its structure to the external environment, to deny what the world has inflicted upon the body. In turn, this power to repress the world is used against the body itself. Only now, it is a body that is no longer recognisable as mine. Several pages later, the insight comes: “These moments can be no more than moments, and for most of the time personal existence represses the organism to its existential self, or itself to the organism” (97). Here, phenomenology becomes not only a hermeneutics of the body, but also an archaeology of the body. The body is transformed from a site of experience to an archaeological dig site, out of which “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here” is excavated (296).