THE THEORY OF THE BODY IS ALREADY A THEORY OF PERCEPTION
Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constandy alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system. When I walk round my flat, the various aspects in which it presents itself to me could not possibly appear as views of one and the same thing if I did not know that each of them represents the flat seen from one spot or another, and if I were unaware of my own movements, and of my body as retaining its identity through the stages of those movements. I can of course take a mental bird's eye view of the flat, visualize it or draw a plan of it on paper, but in that case too I could not grasp the unity of the object without the mediation of bodily experience, for what I call a plan is only a more comprehensive perspective: it is the flat 'seen from above', and the fact that I am able to draw together in it all habitual perspectives is dependent on my knowing that one and the same embodied subject can view successively from various positions. It will perhaps be objected that by restoring the object to bodily experience as one of the poles of that experience, we deprive it of precisely that which constitutes its objectivity. From the point of view of my body I never see as
the cube tnwli: «1»..............>■'"•>.....I
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successive susesot bU expel.................. „„nilun*.»u lie,
i      i .1 ,  ,,lu« w nil     ^s equal aim
rKe intelUcihle structure \\ hit n pro\ io<
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K,ecuve space
osvn nuwement amdilionsl|w position ol An abject li , cantxary. by conceiving my body itself as a mobile oh|e< i ilwi I im iMr to interpret perceptual appearance a.ul construct ihf nil* as II iruly h The experience of my own movement would iherefore Appear to be more than a psychological circumstance of perception and In make no contribution to determining the significance ol ihe object The oh|ecl and my body would certainly form a system, bin v\r would then have .1 nexus of objective correlations and not, as we were saying earlier, a collection of lived through correspondences. The unily ol ihe object would thus be conceived, not experienced as the correlate of our body's unity.
But can the object be thus detached from the actual conditions under which it is presented to us? One can bring together discursively ihe notion of the number six, the notion of'side' and thai of equality, and link them together in a formula which is the definition of the cube Mul this definition rather puts a question ,0 us than oilers us something to
conceive. One emerges from blind svmh.ili,- .1, 1
6 limi- syrnDoiu thouglu only by percrlv
mg the particular spatial entity which bear. iU» i, 11
together. It is a question of tracing in h ' . *" which encloses a fragment ot space Ltween six ""i™1™1" U>"" words 'enclose' and 'between' have a nieanin  Ji?1" ^ ^
derive it from our experience as embodied mV^' " ^ ll,ry
independently ofthe presence of a psycho-ph ^ T^*] ,n sPdt'r ^sr,, direction, no inside and no outside. A space Is merr Is no
sides of a cube as we are enclosed between ibV"1 between ihe
order to be able to conceive the cube we     *** °ur r<M>m. In
Kt* UP * Position in space,
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UssUriace,now^ w„ perspective The cube with six np.al s„|,.s k „,„ ,lllly illvkjn„ conceivable; tl is Hum uhe as u w.nil.l I.,. !,„■ iihHI; but ihr nibe ^ ^t tor itselt, sune it is an object, Thru- Is a Ihsi ..„!,., .|,lVMMillKlll ,UhlchAnalyucal reflection nils us, ami whirl, tonslsis in ,ssrrii„x ,|,,1( ihe object is in itselt, or absolutely, wlllicun wondering what it ,s' Hut lthere is another, which consists in affirming iho ostensible signibcu.cr the object, without wondering how It enters into our experience. Analytical reflection puts ibrwarcl, instead of the absolute- existence of the object, the thought of an absolute object, and, through trying to dominate the object and think of it from no point of view, it destroys the object's internal structure. If there is, for me, a cube with six equal sides, and if I can link up with the object, this is not because 1 constitute it from the inside: it is because 1 delve into the thickness of the world by perceptual experience. The cube with six equal sides is the limiting idea whereby I express the material presence of the cube which is there before my eyes, under my hands, in its perceptual self-evidence. The sides of the cube are not projections of it, but precisely sides. When I perceive them successively, with the appearance they present in different perspectives, I do not construct the idea of the geometrized projection which accounts for these perspectives: the cube is already there in front of me and reveals itself through them. I do not need to take an objective view of my own movement, or take it into account, in order to reconstitute the true form of the object behind its appearing: the account is already taken, and already the new appearance has compounded itself with the lived-through movement and presented itself as an appearance of a cube. The thing, and the world, are given to me along with the parts of my body, not by any natural geometry', but in a living connection comparable, or rather identical, with that existing between the parts of my body itself.
External perception and the perception of one s own body vary in conjunction because they are the two facets of one and the same act. The attempt has long been made to explain Aristotle s celebrated ulu-
! ^narrustomed position or the nngers makes
sion by allowing that the unaccustom   r 5 rk*      u        f their perceptions impossible: the right side of the the synthesis of their percep ^ ^ ^ ^
middle finger and the left ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
together, and if botn arc ^
|m  uU ,u» epilog ol ihr       hn^rs arc not Qnly 11     ^  lmvlU,| ,he Mlb)#CI attrlblllM to the index vshat |S
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.......*        N^iPOtol ^a*»U, for example.-
NyMbM «l >>"       tactile perception, in one single oh,eu
mM......hU  l.....I - mw*       the portion d the finge* u
im rtaiwualh rare, it W thai ihe right lace of the middle K,vtw and the left lace ol the index cannot combine m a joint explora-^ vM ,|w object, thai the wooing ol the fingers, being a movement which lux to he nn,u-rd on ihem. lies outtide the motor possibilities rt( mr tmgeis thenuelve. and cannot be aimed ai in a project towards movement the synthesu ol the ohjeci ti here effected, then, through the tynthtaUi ui unt'l own body, it in the repl> or correlative to it. ami \\ is Uteialh tht Mime thing to peueoe one single marble, ami to use two tinges as one single oigan  I he disturbance ol the body image OH) even be ill recti) uauslaied into the external world without the Intervention ol am stimulus In heautoscopy. before seeing himself, ihe sub|ect alwaw passes iluoiigh a slate akin to dreaming, musing or dlscnitet, and the image ol himself \\ hn h appears outside him is merely the counterpart of this depersonalization   The patient has the feeling ol being In the double outside himself. |iisi as. in a lift which goes upwards ami suddenl) slops. I feel the substance of my body escaping from me through my head and overrunning the boundaries ol my objective hod\ li is m his own body thai die patient leels the approach of this Other whom he has never seen with Ins eyes, as the normal person is aware, through a certain burning feeling m the nape of the neck, that someone is watching him from behind ' Converse* certain form of external experience implies and produce
onversely, a s a certain
tattvtn, C.tiuuI. SchlWer, quoted h> l-hernntie. I 'lmay dr noirr Corps, pp. it and fl "ihciuuue. I'lnuv Jr <H>lir C      pp l <t» p |»M   During the period ol autoscopy
the subicu is overvoro* tn a Idling ol prolound sadness which spreads outwards and mio lUr ver> image ol ihc double, which seems to be tilled witli eHecuve vibrations identical wnh those rvpruetued by the original person', his consciousness seems to have moved wholh outside himself And Menninger Lerchenthal. Dus Truyytbildc dcr rigaxn GMdh.p "I suddens lud the impression ol being outside my body ' ' hs|vrs. quoted hv Menningei lerchetilhal. tip cit , p 7b
THEORY OF THE BODY ,S ALREADY A THEORY OF PERCEPT.ON
consciousness of one's own body. Many patients speak of a 'sixth sense which seems to produce their hallucinations. Stratton's subject, whose visual field has been objectively inverted, at first sees everything upside down; on the third day of the experiment, when things are beginning to regain their upright position, he is filled with 'the strange impression of looking at the fire out of the back of his head'.4 This is because there is an immediate equivalence between the orientation of the visual field and the awareness of one's own body as the potentiality of that field, so that any upheaval experimentally brought about can appear indifferendy either as the inversion of phenomenal objects or as a redistribution of sensory functions in the body. If a subject focuses for long-distance vision, he has a double image of his own finger as indeed of all objects near to him. If he is touched or pricked, he is aware of being touched or pricked in two places.5 Diplopia is thus extended into a bodily duplication. Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of my body is made explicit in the language of external perception. If, then, as we have seen to be the case, the body is not a transparent object, and is not presented to us in virtue of the law of its constitution, as the circle is to the geometer, if it is an expressive unity which we can learn to know only by actively taking it up, this structure will be passed on to the sensible world. The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception. We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of its always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the same way we shall need to reawaken our experience of the world as it appears to us in so far as we are in the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body. But by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall also rediscover ourself, since, perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of perception.