Here-Being a Body: Variations on Kusch and Spinoza

Abstract

This text is a reflexive construction on the body, elaborated with fragments of authors that reveal hidden continuities in the framework of a considerable anachronism: B. Spinoza and R. Kusch. As regards the first of the authors, there is a kinship of his Ethics according to the geometric order with the tradition of Semitic humanism, in the soul-body leveling of Spinozian “parallelism” and that unity that E. Dussel calls “anthropic monism”. But it is perceived that in Spinoza’s monism the power—what the body can do—displace the primacy of the essence, giving rise to a playful conception of the body. Kusch’s philosophy in his concept of “here-being” revives the anthropic monism on American soil in a way that combines the stay like the stay in the ritual with being as deformation from the playing. That is why the concept of popular in Kusch synthesizes the ludic and the sacred.