Hoc est enim corpus meum: we come from a culture where this cult phrase will have been tirelessly uttered by millions of people officiating in millions of rites. Everyone in this culture, Christian or otherwise, (re)cognizes it. Among Christians, some value it as a real consecration—God’sbodyisthere—others, as a symbol—thanks to which those who form abodywith God can commune. For us, it’s also the most visible repetition of an obstinate or sublimated paganism: bread and wine, other bodies of other gods, mysteries of sensory certitude. In the realm of our sentences, it’s perhaps...

Before starting, I’d like to say that, while I was on the way here yesterday, I was extremely troubled by the fact that I am taking part in a colloquium about the body just as the headlines ofLe Mondeare announcing the tortures and cruelties currently being committed in Bosnia. It’s just that, I don’t know how to put this, I’d like to give some thought to them before starting, to all those tortured, violated, wounded, humiliated bodies in Bosnia, at this very moment. And I’d add, for those bodies being denied their being as bodies.

I decided not...

Let’s begin by reading a long passage from the letter that Descartes wrote to Elizabeth on June 28, 1643, which undoubtedly constitutes his major text on the knowledge of the union of soul and body.

Metaphysical thoughts that exercise the pure understanding make the notion of the soul familiar to us; and the study of mathematics, which exercises primarily the imagination in thinking about shapes and movements, gets us accustomed to forming very distinct notions of body. Finally, it is only by using our lived experience and ordinary interactions, and by abstaining both from meditation and from studying things that...

Outside is the world, and we’re all outside. Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought worries about the outside. Worried, it doesn’t settle for, or settle on, any of the classical figures for the relation to exteriority that philosophy crosses, retrieves, and displaces. Outside: exteriority doesn’t derive from an alterity that would divide the self on the inside, even if such a division were primary and constitutive. Because it’s not a question of keeping one’s own negation inside but of thinking each self as some “one” existing with others: one of us all. Outside: exteriority isn’t the sublime or transgressive experience of the failure...

1. A body’s material. It’s dense. It’s impenetrable. Penetrate it, and you break it, puncture it, tear it.

2. A body’s material. It’s off to one side. Distinct from other bodies. A body begins and ends against another body. The void is itself a subtle kind of body.

3. A body isn’t empty. It’s full of other bodies, pieces, organs, parts, tissues, knee-caps, rings, tubes, levers, and bellows. It’s also full of itself: that’s all it is.

4. A body’s long, large, high, and deep: all the while being bigger or smaller. A body’s extended. It touches other bodies on all sides. A body’s...

The intruder introduces himself forcefully, by surprise or by ruse, not, in any case, by right or by being admitted beforehand. Something of the stranger has to intrude, or else he loses his strangeness. If he already has the right to enter and stay, if he is awaited and received, no part of him being unexpected or unwelcome, then he is not an intruder any more, but then neither is he any longer a stranger. To exclude all intrusiveness from the stranger’s coming is therefore neither logically acceptable nor ethically admissible.

If, once he is there, he remains a stranger,...