Ambiguous, Constitutive Caring

Andrea Hiott

Universität Heidelberg

March 5, 2026, 1 p.m. UTC // March 5, 2026, 1 p.m. in UTC

As Di Paolo, De Jaegher, and Cuffari make clear in Linguistic Bodies (and elsewhere in their work), the question "what is a body?" is crucial and challenging and still rather rarely discussed directly in philosphy, even when bodily knowledge is prioritized. This talk builds on ideas in the first half of Linguistic Bodies, exploring and entangling some of those paths through positive ideas of ambiguity (bonne ambiguïté) in Merleau-Ponty and looks at an understanding of ‘body’ as a bracketing we make of what is unbracketable, and also, of evidence that what has been bracketed can never be unbracketed. Holding this paradox is an expresion of the tension, ambiguity and jouissance of the body as ‘constituitively caring’. In other words, bodies (be they cells, individual, groups, etc.) are constellations of care; ambiguous, tense constellations infused with their own uncontainability, transforming constantly so as to survive their own pulsations, and so as to keep that pulsation flowing. This is (following in the enactive traditions mentioned) also connected with the precarious and needful freedom found in the work of Hans Jonas, a sort of metabolic tension between being and non-being that constitutes life but that I am pushing further here to say is literally constituitive. This might be a way of shifting the larger evolutionary narrative from ‘competition’ to ‘care’ while still respecting the irresolvable tensions that come when we bracket bodies as constituitive caring.

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