-.).ˆ -connecting-doing-undoing (bodies)

Our bodies are not entirely our own. However much you might care for them, feed them, dress them up, put them to use, stroke them, kiss them, pornographize them and all the rest, our bodies are ours but not entirely so. And that is where history becomes politics. According to Judith Butler’s revealing description we are «from the start [...] given over to an Other»1, even prior to individuation we are predefi ned by the Other and the effect is the «social vulnerability of our bodies»; predefi ned as a way of symbolically proving what society expects of us with reference to the body: an organism, an image, a sex, an age, a face2, a gender, a discourse... something that nonetheless involves both a castration of the being and a «physical and social grounding»3. Levinas4 argues that it is not so much the advancement of the Other but the encounter with the Other that simultaneously instils a responsibility for the Other in oneself (a construction in the other), such that the subject is responsible for the Other even before being conscious of its own existence.