Episode 51 A Message from the Emperor, part 2

We return to Kafka’s tale this week – a tale of a distance that can never be breached. What if we understood the ‘you’ in Kafka’s ‘Message from the Emperor’ – that lowly subject at the edge of the empire – as a self that’s attached to the social body? And what if the emperor, intent upon sending ‘you’ a message, were the human body?

In this episode I invite listeners to imagine that between the social body and the human body is an insurmountable distance.

To explore this idea requires us to delve into philosophical inquiry about consciousness and human bodies. For that, I rely upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. For Merleau-Ponty, there’s no distance between the body and consciousness.

I’m proposing not only is there a distance, but that distance is insurmountable. And I wonder aloud: what if the human body has some meaning, or some ‘message’ beyond being an instrument of consciousness or perception? What if we understood the human body to be the ‘other’ that Levinas tells us we have a responsibility to?