Descartes' corps

The body haunts us. It molests us wherever we are, whether we imagine ourselves beyond it, transcendental and without place, or whether we dismiss the ruse of such displacement and locate ourselves as positioned subjects. The body remains, disturbing us however we conceive the self. This is the case at both ends of modernity: at the beginning, in the writing of those two who will have turned away from others and toward themselves in a gesture toward knowledge of self that would be sufficient to ground a world, in Montaigne and Descartes; and at modernity's end, in the anthropological writing of those who turn toward others in order to ground knowledge of themselves, in the writing of, for example, Renato Rosaldo.¹ The body troubles these apparently very different projects and necessarily so, for the body will have been the contact zone for any and all relations among others, even among ourselves. Between me and myself the body remains, lies in state, grounding the possibility of anthropos and anthropology.