phainomena

PHAINOMENA XXV/98-99
THE HORIZONS OF EMBODIMENT
26
serious shortcoming induced by cognitivist presuppositions in cognitive
science, this time pertaining to interhuman social understanding, which is often
misconstrued as “mindreading”. As a more promising alternative, the author
presents social understanding as supported by a shared social world established
through the unfolding of embodied interaction, which leads Demšar to adopt
a modified version of the enactive account of “participatory sense-making”.
On this ground, the author then goes on to focus on the importance of the prereflective
character of social understanding, as exemplified by the crucial role
of body memory and the feeling of familiarity in establishing and sustaining
face-to-face interactions.
The next paper entitled “Temporalization of Touch and its Consequences
for Embodiment” by Julia Garstenauer, focuses on an unexpected shortcoming
(given Husserl’s extensive work on time-consciousness) that seems to haunt
the established phenomenological analysis of embodiment: the lack of a
more thorough examination of the specific temporal horizon of embodiment.
Through her critical reflections on Husserl’s analysis of touch, Garstenauer
argues that the original tactual constitution of the lived body as a “bearer of
sensations” must be understood not only in terms of localization, but also, and
no less importantly, in terms of temporalization. More specifically, Garstenauer
reinterprets the notion of embodiment as a temporal manifold of touching
and being touched, arguing that, due to the inescapability of time deferral in
the constitution of embodiment, the relation between lived body and physical
body is not to be understood as “co-presence”, but rather as an ineliminable
“non-coincidence”.
In “Interanimality and Animal Encounters: The Phenomenology of
Human-Animal Relations” Martin Huth takes us back to problems faced by
phenomenological accounts of nonhuman embodiment when confronted
with the nonhuman horizon of animality. The author opts for a relational
analysis of our pre-reflective and embodied “inter-animality” with animal
beings, which, he claims, is shaped by the social processes of habituation.
More specifically, Huth purports to show that human perception of animals
is molded by embodied structures of “tacit recognizability”, which result in a
selective social recognition of different kinds of animals. However, according
to the author, this does not mean that these social patterns of normality are