phainomena

LUCIA ZAIETTA
orienting them toward the inter-sensory unity of a ‘world.’ Movement is not
a movement in thought, and bodily space is not a space that is conceived or
represented. (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 139; italics mine)“
The materiality of the body defines our being inside time and space. But,
according to Merleau-Ponty:
“[W]e must not say that our body is in space nor for that matter in time.
It inhabits space and time. […] I am not in space and in time, nor do I
think space and time; rather, I am of space and of time; my body fits itself to
them and embraces them. The scope of this hold measures the scope of my
existence; however, it can never in any case be total. The space and time
that I inhabit are always surrounded by indeterminate horizons that contain
other points of view. The synthesis of time, like that of space, is always to be
started over again. The motor experience of our body is not a particular case
of knowledge; rather, it offers us a manner of reaching the world and the
object, a ‘praktognosia,’ that must be recognized as original, and perhaps as
originary (sic). (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 140–141)“
193
The body inhabits the world because it grasps the world: corporeity is the
templum of the behavior, the seat of the style proper to any organism, the twine of
any possible behavior, the matrix of every existing space. As I said before, spatiality
is not a possession but neither is it a detached substance: in the very moment in
which an organism is in the world, space becomes the field of its possible behaviors.
On Merleau-Ponty’s account, corporeity is what defines an existence (according to