The voice of the flesh: the bridge to a unified world

Abstract

The aim of this work is to deconstruct the ontology on which the fantasy of human supremacy over the rest of the world is based, in order to overcome the metaphysical abyss that separates the world into two different ontological planes. The first steps will be taken by posthumanism in deconstructing the human by genealogically analyzing the human subject as it has been historically constructed by humanism and metaphysics. To culminate this movement, I will address the question of language, central to the widening of the metaphysical abyss throughout the centuries. Developing Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh in close contact with recent studies on the communicative systems of non-human animals and their languages, I will come up with a definition of language open to be experienced by every form-of-life from the embodied experience of the world. This final gesture will allow us to hear the historically silenced voice of the flesh in the existential horizon of a unified world, where everything comes together in a homogeneous fleshly mixture in a monist state of ontological equality.