Belonging: toward a phenomenology of the flesh

The text seeks to interrogate the true meaning and ontological scope of the experience of the body or the flesh, in a movement, even beyond Merleau-Ponty. For this, it is a matter of asking whether this sense of the being of the body, instead of a solution, would not indicate an ill-placed problem, since such a notion seems to be limited as to the description of its own mode of existence. Now, what we advocate here is that this fundamental experience is that of belonging. It is, therefore, insofar as we belong to the world that we have a body: to have a body means nothing else than to belong. In this direction, we propose a phenomenology of belonging, of which there is only the appearance of the world from within it, that is, via an inscription on it. Thus the ontological community and the phenomenological difference are two sides of the same coin, since it is because we are of the world in a deeper sense than the other entities that we are able to make it appear as no one does. Such is the true sense of being of the flesh: it is not body nor consciousness, but a possession (perceptive) of the world which is the counterpart of a (carnal) disappearance.