“…a motherless child.” Heidegger's Abject Bodies
I examine Heidegger’s concept of body in SZ against the background of trauma studies which has, for some time, assigned the body a central role in trauma, not just as biological entity, but as a lived body with a specific temporality. For humans, as embodied and mortal, trauma is not merely an empirical possibility, but is an essential one; namely, the possibility of an essential dissociation in which wholeness and ‘mineness’ are fundamentally called into question. In my paper I first indicate the significance of wholeness for his project, and the role of the ontosomatic in it. Heidegger seeks in being-toward-death Dasein’s being-whole, but his death analysis reveals a displacement of somato-onticity that obscures its peculiar temporality. Two themes converge in this analysis: embodiment and temporality. I propose that the body and its temporality as a (surviving) worldly being is not extrinsic to ‘who’ Dasein is, or to its ‘mineness,’ and to that extent, Dasein’s body is essentially disruptive of Heidegger’s project. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology purchases (ontological) wholeness at the expense of the interminable openness of being-with of having-been (natality) and legacy (future) that cannot be understood apart from bodiliness. In this regard, trauma is not an adventitious occurrence, but a fundamental condition of Dasein.