2015

The body is not only a structure of limbs and organs, of sensations and movements. It is a historically formed body whose experiences have left their traces in its invisible dispositions. By inserting itself into every situation, the body carries its own past into the surroundings as a procedural field. His experiences and dispositions permeate the environment like an invisible net that projects from its senses and limbs, connects us with the world and renders it familiar to us. Each perception, each situation is permeated by implicit bodily recollections. Autobiographic memory only represents the past as the past. The memory of the body, on the contrary, mediates the real, living presence of the past. Thus it is also the essential basis of the self. I am able to recollect my earlier states and attribute them to myself; otherwise my identity would be lost. But even when dementia deprives a person of all explicit recollections, she still retains her bodily memory: the history of her life remains present in the familiar sights, smells, touchings and handlings of things, even when she is no more capable to account for the origin of this familiarity and to tell her history. Her sense become carriers of personal continuity, of a more felt than known recollection, a silent, but faithful memory – the tacit, but enduring memory of the body.