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“The lived body and oriented space are

not outside of each other”

(Besoli 2018: 46).

“Sind unsere Körper noch wir

selbst?” (Paul 2005: 186).

In her book Der Körper, der Leib und die Soziologie, Ulle Jäger calls for empirical work with respect to Leib, offering her theoretical investigations as a starting point. Her inquiries follow a re-recognition of the original phenomenological work of Husserl, Schmitz, and Merleau-Ponty within sociological or related research areas in the German speaking academic context, such as transgender research as carried out by Lindemann as well as Manzei’s research on intensive care and notions of personhood and life in connection with medical and social ideas as they regard to concepts of brain death.

Looking at gender differences, Lindemann develops the following hypothesis:

[…] knowledge – in a concrete or vivid form – about the objectified body and the experienced body have a relationship of reciprocal meaning. The visible and tangible gestalt of the objectified body determines how the living body is experienced, directly and without any reflection or propositional knowledge. To experience one’s own body in this way means that a person’s objectified body is his or her experienced reality. The experienced body thus carries the meaning and the objectified body is the meaning itself. Conversely, knowledge about the objectified body tells the experienced body which form it should assume. In other words, having knowledge of which objectified body I have means to me that I know how my experienced body is constituted. The reflexive relationship between objectified and living body is demonstrated to be a normative meaning relationship. (Lindemann 2010: 288f.)

Although very different in detail, Merleau-Ponty’s later work and Lindemann’s works as cited above meet insofar that they discuss processes of reciprocity as being key to the relationality between Leib and body. Looking at narratives told by persons identifying as transgender, Lindemann comes to the conclusion: “As the modern living body clicks into a reflexive meaning relationship with the objectified body, the objectified body becomes a vivid, exemplary programme that regulates how the experienced body is felt and is separate from its environment, and how the experiencing body centres its experiential space, perceives and acts” (Lindemann 1997: 90). In my reading of Jäger’s and Lindemann’s work, one can (to a certain degree) generalize and thus extend the footprint of Lindemann’s research (as it focuses in analyzing accounts of people identifying as transgender). Yet, my readings of her work, particularly the sections quoted [60] here, points to the need to further investigate the relationship between experienced and objectifiable body. Both Merleau-Ponty and Lindemann, amongst others, are concerned with language, in their own complex ways. Without going into detail here, their concern gives rise to questions such as the following: in what ways is “the language of the objectified body” incorporated into narratives of the experienced body, such that the experience itself becomes embedded in, informed by, and inscribed by processes of objectification? It is imperative that the linguistic shift in Lindemann’s conclusion, as expressed in her second quotation above, is addressed with respect to its reliance on mechanical metaphors, which refer to the programmatic regulation of experience. “Lindemann’s body” clicks into meaning. The terminology here might well be subject to translation, yet it establishes a relationship to descriptions of computerized or mechanic processes. During my research, I learned that a similar reliance on the mix of computerized and mechanical actions of the everyday in relation to descriptions of contemporary biomedical practice and research is evident in representations of stem cell research, somatic cell nuclear programming, fertility treatment, and so forth.

A reading of Lindemann’s and Jäger’s investigations, offered to me as part of a discussion with a colleague, would suggest that Leib cannot be erfahrbar (experienced) without reference to (natural-) scientific knowledge. This is, however, (in my opinion) difficult when it comes to looking at how leibliche experience acts as an impulse for the creation and manifestation of body knowledge. Hence, in order to write about the relationship between experience and knowledge, and to allow for the data used to unfold within the analyses, I emphasize a relational but non-dichotomous understanding of experience and knowledge. Neither experience nor natural scientific knowledge is given temporal priority in the circuitous co-constitution of both.

The term “Leib,” following Lindemann’s and Jäger’s investigations into Plessner’s writings, refers to body that is stimulated from within (belebt) and experienced by a subject from inside as (the) very own entity (Jäger 2004: 49f). In line with Jäger’s explanation, the Leib stands in for the own body, the body that one experiences as what the self feels in and about itself (ibid). Jäger’s theoretical investigation into the relationship between Körper/body and Leib from a sociological point of view leads her to explain the relationship between Körper/body and Leib with the following words: “Der Körper ist nie nur Körper, und der Leib ist nie nur Leib”⁵² (Jäger 2004: 51). The beauty of the statement resides in its simplicity. Neither one, body nor Leib, is ever without the other being part of it, relational, entwined, reciprocal, or engaged in a Bedeutungsverhältnis.⁵³ The “how” of the relationality between Leib and body has been and is crucial in the work of the thinkers introduced above. As much as “how” is an important question, in the field of my research the insistence on [61] an existential relationality between Leib and body is in a pragmatic sense just as important.

In March 2016, I read an interview in Die Zeit Wissen with writer and organ recipient David Wagner. In this article, I read about a surgeon who had performed organ transfers for a long time, yet stated that prior to being confronted with Wagner’s autobiographical book Leben, which is a multi-layered (emotional) testimony of becoming and being a liver recipient, he (the surgeon) never thought that there was more to organ transfer, as the cutting out and inserting of material matter (Wagner 2014 and 2016).⁵⁴ As long as professionals engaging in biomedical practice are “treating bodies,” unaware of the Leib, Gernot Böhme’s call to rehabilitate “Leibsein als Aufgabe” (being Leib as a task) in his homonymous book, translates in my work into a research practice that includes notions of Leib as crucial tools to (re-)consider the leibhaftige way of existance (Existenzweise) of humans as the basis of encounters not only in medicalized spaces, but given the focus of my study, particularly in that sphere (Böhme 2003, 2010). Referring to Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Böhme lays out that “Leib ist bei ihm ein Kampfbegriff […] Gegen die europäische Tradition, das eigentliche des Menschen in der Vernunft, der Seele, dem Geist zu sehen, setzt er das Leibsein als Existenzweise der Zukunft”⁵⁵ (Böhme 2003: 17). From this point of view, the Leib is a constitutive (zukunftsgestaltendes) element of the future development of human kind.

Using a notion of Leib (as intertwined with the body) as a key element of the matrix of this study, this means the theoretical environment the analyses develops within acts as a means of directing my research and analytical practice away from furthering modes of (theoretical) fragmentation, by emphasizing the importance of Leib as intertwined with body, and thus potentially fostering and feeding into discourses that seek to work against “fremdvermittelte, veräußertlichte Erfahrungsweisen”⁵⁶ (Böhme 2003: 37). The inner guidance for me as a researcher thus, is that fragmenting, even in thought, is not an option.

Introducing notions of Leib into the process of my research, as well as the analysis of my data, provides an experimental tool to engage with the imbrication of experiential and theoretical knowledge and understandings of embodiment and subjectivity in the field of RGTs and related biomedical practices. As mentioned before, this study involves conversations with women about their bodies and their theoretical and experiential encounters with RGTs. However, this cannot be seen as already allowing insights into both spheres, as talking about [62] can be located in the area of discourse. The fact that what is talked about refers to, or is based on, subjective experience, following Jäger, is not enough to state that what is at stake is body itself (Jäger 2004).

By including the term “Leib” in the terminology used during this research, it is understood that the discourse of Leib is one alongside other discourses. Yet, while the historical development of natural scientific knowledge of the body is situated in the study of corpuses, Leib discourse is concerned with the body, which is alive and always includes the individual self, which is excluded when using a concept of the body as mere object (Laqueur 1992). Including notions of Leib in this empirical study promises therefore, a different perspective.