The Embodied Gaze: Flesh, Spatiality and Beyond
The Embodied Gaze: Flesh, Spatiality and Beyond

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the involvement of the flesh in the contemplation of depictive images. Against the apparent disincarnation of the gaze in front of such images, we argue that the phenomenalisation of the depicted world implies not only the empirical body but that diving into an image awakens a bodily dimension proper to phantasy. Our point of departure is the contrast between the functioning of the body in the experience of the objective world and its role in the constitution of the place of the image in the empirical space. The image opens up on a different space, a space of unreality in the space of reality that modifies the way I inhabit my body. In a second step, we show, in a Husserlian context, that the spatialising function of my body is maintained – to some extent – even in the world of the image. This matter of fact calls for the thematisation of kinestheses in phantasy. In the third part, we show that kinestheses related to the contemplative gaze, besides being related to possible positions, also have a tempo and a rhythm that reveal a dimension of kinestheses that transcends the apparent cleavage between the real and the imaginary.

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