The Everyday ‘Thinking’ of the Body. The Case of ‘Alice’
The Everyday ‘Thinking’ of the Body. The Case of ‘Alice’

Summary/Abstract: The problem field that the article delineates is related to the assumption that it is possible to think the logic of practice according to its own measure, emphasizing its ‘active’ aspect, i.e. as a method through which the everyday practical acting in the world is organized. Combining the phenomenological method and the reflexive sociology of Bourdieu, the author views practical logic as an ensemble of motor schemes and bodily automatisms which unfold from the immediate interaction between man and the things. Thus formulated, the problem of practical logic as an acting in the world requires us to reformulate of the problem of the body and, rather, the way everyday logic thinks the body, as a ‘seeing in action’, as well as to consider the corporeality as a form of the ‘living thinking’ and a condition of possibility/impossibility of acting in and judging on the world. In reviewing these problem areas, the authors demonstrates the heuristic force of this way of thinking practical logic, by the reversal of the body-space relation in Lewis Carroll’s book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where the incommensurability between ‘the world of Alice’ and the everyday reality is viewed as an incommensurability between the practical logics in which those immersed in their games think. The disturbance of the ontological complicity between habitus and habitat, in which the one invades and ‘assimilates’ the other, makes possible the seeing of the body by the agents. But the more visible the corporeality, the more it has stopped to be someone’s, functional and acting. The invisibility of the body, its concealment from the gaze comes out to be the condition of possibility of a successful action in the world of objects.

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