THE BODY AND REVOLT
The entire history of western civilization
can be read as a systematic attempt to exclude and isolate the body. From Plato
on, this has been seen from time to time as folly to control, impulse to repress,
labor power to arrange, unconscious to psychoanalyze.
The platonic separation between the body
and the mind, a separation carried out to the complete advantage of the latter
(“the body is the tomb of the mind”), even accompanies the seemingly most
radical expressions of thought.
Now, this thesis is supported in numerous
philosophy texts, almost all except those that are alien to the rarefied and
unwholesome atmosphere of the universities. A reading of Nietzsche and of the
authors like Hannah Arendt has found its appropriate scholastic systematization
(phenomenological psychology, idea of difference and a way of pigeon-holing).
Nonetheless, or actually because of this, it does not seem to me that this
problem, the implications of which are many and fascinating, has been
considered in depth.
A profound liberation of individuals
entails an equally profound transformation of the way of conceiving the body,
its expression and its relations.
Due to a battle-trained christian heritage,
we are led to believe that domination controls and expropriates a part of the
human being without however damaging her inner being (and there is much that
could be said about the division between a presumed inner being and external
relationships). Of course, capitalist relationships and state impositions
adulterate and pollute life, but we think that our perceptions of ourselves and
of the world remain unaltered. So even when we imagine a radical break with the
existent, we are sure that it is our body as we presently think of it that will
act on this.
I think instead that our body has suffered
and continues to suffer a terrible mutilation. And this is not only due to the
obvious aspects of control and alienation determined by technology. (That
bodies have been reduced to reservoirs of spare organs is clearly shown by the
triumph of the science of transplants, which is described with an insidious
euphemism as a “frontier of medicine”. But to me the reality seems much worse
than pharmaceutical speculations and the dictatorship of medicine as a separate
and powerful body reveals.) The food, the air, the daily relations have
atrophied our senses. The senselessness of work, the forced sociality, the
dreadful materiality of the chit-chat, regiment both thought and the body,
since no separation is possible between them.
The docile observance of the law, the
imprisoning channels into which desires, which such captivity really transforms
into sad ghosts of themselves, are enclosed weakens the organism just as much
as pollution or forced medication.
“Morality is exhaustion,” said Nietzsche.
To affirm one’s own life, that exuberance
that demands to be given, entails a transformation of the senses no less than
of ideas and relationships.
I have frequently come to see people as
beautiful, even physically, who had seemed almost insignificant to me until a
short time earlier. When you are projecting your life and test yourself in
possible revolt with someone, you see in your playmates beautiful individuals,
and not the sad faces and bodies that extinguish their light in habit and
coercion any more. I believe that they really are becoming beautiful (and not
that I simply see them as such) in the moment in which they express their
desires and live their ideas.
The ethical resoluteness of one who
abandons and attacks the power structures is a perception, a moment in which
one tastes the beauty of one’s comrades and the misery of obligation and
submission. “I rebel, therefore I am” is a phrase from Camus that never ceases
to charm me as only a reason for life can do.
In the face of a world that presents ethics
as the space of authority and law, I think that there is no ethical dimension
except in revolt, in risk, in the dream. The survival in which we are confined
is unjust because it brutalizes and uglifies.
Only a different body can realize that
further view of the life that opens to desire and mutuality, and only an effort
toward beauty and toward the unknown can free our fettered bodies.
Massimo Passamani