Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
A Philosopher's Weight
Authored By — Chariklia Martalas

Abstract

A Philosopher's Weight is a work of auto-theory emerging from necessity. The writer's bodily crisis exposes an untenable fragility found when her conviction in posthumanist ideas of materialism is discontinuous with the lived reality of her embodiment. However, rather than dismissing theory, philosophy becomes a method of care. Theory helps name problematic self-understandings and their logic and then radicalizes as a catalyst for uncovering the unknown path of a different way of being. The method of the piece is the immediacy of its writing. A dramatic performance of returning and re-returning to the act of thinking anew. The piece recursively unravels inherited familial scripts, self-witnessing through the perceptions of others, the intensity of lived bodily reality and the nonhumanness of a medicated body. In this unravelling, the writer creates a hybrid text in motion. Both philosophical and memoiristic, these modes of writing challenge and drive the piece through the demands they place on each other. However, at every turn the danger in the act of writing is present— the difficulty of leaving behind previous thinking as well continuously having to confront how the unexpected forces re-examination. Each turn and return of the piece deepens the answers and the questions of what it means to inhabit a body. In the process embodiment successively transforms into something stranger. By the end what is clear is that the act of writing one's embodiment cannot be concluded. It is an ongoing process, messy in its ambiguity, with a body that will never lose its otherness. What the writing proves in its lack of closure is not the failure of philosophy to capture the complexity of embodiment. Instead it is the power of philosophy to rupture the language of our descriptions that are failing us as a means for new language to emerge.

Keywords

Auto-theory, Embodiment, Posthumanist Materialism, Relationality, Trans-corporeality, Storied Matter.

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