Absent Body

“That organ with which I perform my labor, eat my food, caress my loved ones, yet remains a stranger to me. This strangeness is even more pronounced in the case of the internal organs. I would surely be unable to recognize the look of my own heart, though my very life depends upon its function.”

What drew me to this book was the title. It was a simple title, it had an aesthetic to it, that of simplicity. I thought to myself: “The book is going to talk about embodied experience and against Descartes’s cogito ergo sum.” Because, in the 2020s, it is evident that we know what it means to be disembodied subjects. The sheer amount of caffeine humanity consumes and the rise of intentional “biohacking” to excavate every last drop of physic energy makes clear our experience in doing so.

Drew Leder writes about this cultural moment, providing mainly insight with some critique of Cartesian dualism. He applies the phenomenological method to show why ontologically committing to Cartesian dualism makes “sense” for modern man while highlighting what is lost in the process. To do so, he pulls from key phenomenologists like Straus, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and, most interestingly, his training as a medical doctor to speak on and explore the body.1 The sum effect provides lucid, practical insights while beguiling the reader to reconsider the knowledge hierarchy of mind/body, brain/viscera.

The Ecstatic Body

“It is thus possible to state a general principle: insofar as I perceive through an organ, it necessarily recedes from the perceptual field it dis-closes. I do not smell my nasal tissue, hear my ear, or taste my taste buds.”

The ecstatic body makes more sense when considering the second lesser known definition of ecstatic: involving and experience of mystic self-transcendence. Leder talks on the experiencing body and our sensory apparatuses, dubbed as sensorimotors:

“The surface is where self meets what is other than self.”

The chapter is essentially a summary of previous work related to theorizing about the employment of perception, the limits of perceptions, and some idiosyncrasies related to perception. Leder starts off with introducing the idea of the null point: a baseline orientation or reference point from which experiences or actions are gauged. For example, the frame of distinction between left or right. To conceptualize this better, I drew a 2D figure with a cone going out from the eye; that point is the null point of vision, the beginning of sight. This idea of a null point is then expanded upon with the introduction of the actional field. The things that the null point opens up or projects too. The things you can touch, see, kick, smell, hear. Actional fields are the realm of experience the sensorimotors open up the body to experience.

But if our surface body is what allows us to experience and navigate the world, why is it treated as secondary to the mind? Leder draws from Michael Polanyi’s idea of “from-to” knowledge from his theory of tacit knowledge. What the “from-to” knowledge says is that there is a whole body of unconscious tacit workings when we direct energy to doing something. When we are walking, we are not consciously directing all of our muscle groups to move or do the task of walking to a destination. In this way, our biology is developed in a way that it remains largely absent from our perception of its workings.2 And crucially, it occurs not even due to not having “direct” or constant acknowledgement of the body, but literally disappears or self-effaces during a goal-oriented task.

The point of this section then was to accomplish one thing. That is demonstrating how much knowledge the body actually contains in the form of tacit knowledge and how the very nature of tacit knowledge makes it invisible to the mind, henceforth the body is treated as invisible as well. There is this interesting chicken-egg problem on whether it is the mind or body that coordinates the learning of tacit know-how. There is also another interesting problem if you believe in Polanyi, which is related to tacit know-thats.3

The Recessive Body

“the Merleau-Pontian subject still bears a distant resemblance to its Cartesian predecessor, never fully fleshed out with bone and guts.”

Leder’s medical training stands out in this chapter and addresses/gives name to some of my concerns regarding theviscera. He makes the distinction of interoception and exteroception, the former related to the visceral senses and the ladder focused on the traditional senses of sight, smell, taste, touch, sound. During the distinction he uses it to question why there is such little qualitative range for the viscera. The skin can be warm, hot, pricked, tickled, touched, pinched, cut, and many more. But, the viscera for comparison is limited and often stereotypedconsidering the wide range of “inputs” the visceral organs can interact with.

Though, the reason why the viscera remains elusive is against not just because we don’t priveledge the body as a form of knowledge, but because it evades us as the knowers. Leder highlights the biological make-up of most of the organs to highlight how they aren’t wired up with the same amount of pain receptors as the external facing body does. This leads to a medical phenomenon called referred pain, where the causal location of pain is often spread out to different places in the viscera. Pain from heart attack localizes in the forearms. Stomach pains localizes in the back. Kidney pains can localize in the thighs. To make it even more complicated, some pain is just wholly ambiguous to the visceral regions.

The viscera is in a way doubly private. Private to the self or “I” in the fact that it is within. Given pictures of your own organs, you would fail to recognize them as “yours”. Private to “Others” as an inter-subjective means. For example, sensorimotors’s inter-subjectivity are dependent on the shared actional fields all bodies have access to and relate with. I can see what you see, I can touch what you touch, I can hear what you hear, I can taste what you taste, I can smell what you smell. But, I am unable to feel what you feel viscerally. In Leder’s word, the organ has no “projective field”.

That troubles me because I picked up this book in an attempt to answer a question about what psychosomatic analysis entails. Because how are we even supposed to give names to experiences of which are layered behind our own perception, but also the other? Psychoanalysis has some semblance of legitimacy because it operates through shared receptions. Free Association, Dream Analysis, Transference, and etc. all work on symbols. What I mean by that is that whatever it is, it is communicable through shared language and material. But it seems the viscera could only be communicated through metaphor and ultimately remains private.4

Leder relates these same troubles to diagnosing visceral pains in medical practices:

“An experience of “tightness” in the chest could signal any a number of cardiac, respiratory, muscular, or even alimentary difficulties, given the imprecision of interoception.”

The Dys-appearing Body

“It is as if the pain were ever born anew, although nothing whatsoever has changed.”

The body only appears to the mind when it dysfunctions. The end.


  1. On Goodreads someone commented that this was Merleau-Ponty lite. This is my first in-depth dive into it, but if anything a good intro? ↩

  2. An interesting thing Polanyi’s extrapolates is to say scientific knowledge “know-that” is also understood in relation to the tacit. ↩

  3. A logical positivist would hate neural networks. ↩

  4. There can be shared analysis, but it has to be subject first. ↩