Quotes About Body

Until three months, the infant does not have the concept of his own body but only an impression of incompleteness.

The objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body...which has merely a conceptual existence.

Evolution, embryogenesis: The body - object is only a trace--Trace in the mechanical sense: present substitute of a past that no longer is--the trace for us is more than the present effect of the past. It is a survival of the past, an enjambment. The trace and the fossil: ammonite. The living thing is no longer there but it is almost there; we have the negative of it.

Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of y body is made explicit in the language of external perception.

The theory of the body schema is implicitly a theory of perception. We have learned to again sense our bodies; we have discovered, beneath objective and detached knowledge of the body, this other knowledge that we have of it because it is always with us and because we are bodies. It will be necessary to similarly awaken the experience of the world such as it appears to us insofar as we are in the world through our bodies, and insofar as we perceive the world with our bodies.

As the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other's are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.

Nature resists. It cannot be entirely established in front of us. The body is a nature at work within us.

When I am seated at my table, I can instantly 'visualize' the parts of my body that it conceals from me. As I clench my foot inside my shoe, I can see it. I have this power even for parts of my body that I have never seen.

Language functions with respect to thought as the body does with respect to perception...Some words only come forth in us when we have need of them...As an instrument, language is not like a hammer that has a limited number of uses. It is more like a piano, from which one can draw an infinite number of melodies.

In a body activity like language, there is a blind logic, laws of equilibrium that are observed by the community of speaking subjects without any of them being conscious of it.

As a system of motor powers or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an 'I think': it is a totality of lived significations that moved toward it's equilibrium.

We shall render explicit the cohesion of the obverse and the reverse of my body which is responsible for the fact that my body—which is visible, tangible like a thing—acquires this view upon itself, this contact with itself, where it doubles itself up, unifies itself, in such a way that the objective body and the phenomenal body turn about one another or encroach upon one another.

My body, which is one of the visibles, sees itself also and thereby makes itself the natural light opening its own interior to the visible, in order for the visible there to become my own landscape, realizing (as it is said) the miraculous promotion of Being to "consciousness," or (as we prefer to say) the segregation of the "within" and the "without

For the psychoanalyst, what is original is the structure of the body as an emblem of life.

With psychoanalysis mind passes into body, as inversely, body passes into mind.

If it is true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of of the world.

I function by construction. I am installed on a pyramid of time which has been me...Time is that 'body of the spirit" Valery used to talk about. Time and thought are mutually entangled. In the dark night of thought dwells a glimmering of Being.

The organism is an edifice of compensated instabilities (cf. walk, lose one's balance, catch oneself). Sich bewegen= to organize the instability oneself, and thereby dominate it (the Sich defined without 'consciousness').

The body schema is a power to vary a certain principle without explicit knowledge of this principle...This playing with a principle that's not possessed is consciousness itself. Consciousness is, if you like, synonymous with imperception. Consciousness of a figure is consciousness without knowledge of a background.

The perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis. Subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing other than temporality...In every moment of focusing, my body ties a present, a past, and a future together. It secretes time, or rather it becomes that place in nature where for the first time events, rather than pushing each other into being, project a double horizon of the past and future around the present and acquire a historical orientation.

What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is invariably both freedom and servitude. Thus, to summarize, the ambiguity of being in the world is expressed by the ambiguity of our body, and this latter is understood through the ambiguity of time.

The actions in which I habitually engage incorporate their instruments and make them participate in the original structure of my own body. Moreover, my own body is the primordial habit, the one that conditions all others and by which they can be understood.

One does not love a person, one does not love a body, one loves a life established in a body.

Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity.